“Do not visit the WikiLeaks site,” the Office of Senate Security told Senate employees and contractors in a memorandum (pdf) that was circulated to Senate offices this past week. Senate employees are free to access news reports that may discuss classified material, but they were instructed not to download the “underlying documents that themselves are […]
Department of Defense employees who downloaded classified documents from Wikileaks onto unclassified government computer systems may delete them without further “sanitizing” their systems or taking any other remedial measures, the Pentagon said in a policy memo (pdf) last week. The release of classified State Department cables and other classified documents by Wikileaks has produced special […]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reported a notable increase in its classification activity last year, along with an even greater increase in the ODNI “population.” The number of ODNI “derivative classification decisions” — referring to the classification of new records under previously issued guidance — increased 7.6% to 1,762,999 from the year […]
Chinese bloggers “expressed rage and despondence after learning about the plight of 12 mentally retarded men from Sichuan province who were sold into slavery to work at a building materials plant in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,” according to a CIA review of the Chinese blogosphere (pdf) during the week of December 10-17, 2010. The […]
The Fundamental Classification Guidance Review is the Obama Administration’s most ambitious effort to confront the problem of overclassification. It requires each agency that classifies information to conduct a detailed review of all of its classification guides in order to identify obsolete classification requirements and to eliminate them. As spelled out in section 1.9 of executive […]
The purposes, authorities, and instruments of congressional oversight are described in detail in a newly-expanded Congressional Oversight Manual (pdf) prepared by the Congressional Research Service. “Congressional oversight and investigations can often, though not always, become adversarial,” the CRS Manual observes. “This is especially true when the entity being targeted, whether a private individual, corporation, or […]
The technology for sequencing human DNA is advancing so rapidly and the cost is dropping so quickly that the number of individuals whose DNA has been mapped is expected to grow “from hundreds of people (current) to millions of people (probably within three years),” according to a new report to the Pentagon (pdf) from the […]
A bill in the last Congress “to provide a comprehensive framework for the United States to prevent and prepare for biological and other WMD attacks” was described in a lengthy Senate report last month. The report provided a detailed congressional perspective on a range of biosecurity issues, inspired in part by the Graham-Talent Commission on […]
Following NATO’s strategic concept and expectations that the next round of US-Russian nuclear arms control negotiations will deal with tactical nuclear weapons in some shape or form, Stan Norris and I have published our latest estimate on U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Although the strategic concept states that […]
Corrected below “A review of the Pakistani media during October 2010 indicates that there is less talk of imminent political change.” That is the rather pedestrian conclusion of a brief report (pdf) that was prepared last November by “Open Source Works,” a previously unknown initiative of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. Open Source Works “was […]
The Obama Administration is preparing to give increased military and economic aid to Pakistan, the Washington Post reported last weekend. (“U.S. to Offer More Support to Pakistan” by Karen DeYoung, January 8.) Nearly $20 billion in civilian and military support has been provided to Pakistan between Fiscal Years 2002 and 2010, according to a newly […]
The diminishing U.S. lead in various scientific disciplines related to national security has posed a particular challenge for U.S. intelligence agencies, according to a newly released 2006 report (pdf) of the Intelligence Science Board. “While the overall effect of a declining S&T [science and technology] position on the United States remains the subject of debate, […]