The U.S. State Department is inviting members of the public to present their concerns about human rights in the United States as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, in which the human rights records of all UN Member States are to be reviewed. “In the pursuit of a transparent and effective UPR process, […]
New technologies could be used to improve internet security but the impact of those technologies on personal privacy is classified information, the director of the National Security Agency told Congress last week. “How could the Internet be designed differently to provide much greater inherent security?” the Senate Armed Services Committee asked Lt. General Keith Alexander, […]
The Senate Intelligence Committee has posted a collection of its biennial public reports on the Committee’s activities, from the first report in 1976 to the latest in 2009, providing a retrospective survey of intelligence controversies past and present. “The committee has unintentionally produced a profoundly biased political document,” complained the late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan […]
The law does not authorize the Department of Homeland Security to regulate or penalize the publication of sensitive transportation security-related information on private websites, the Department advised Congress (pdf) recently. Last December, the Transportation Security Administration inadvertently posted a manual marked “sensitive security information” that described procedures for screening of airline passengers. Following its discovery, […]
By authorizing extreme interrogation methods and defining them as legally permissible, the Bush Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel enabled “our country’s descent into torture,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) last year at a contentious hearing of a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee that he chaired. The hearing presented contrasting views on a range of related issues, including […]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it does not practice data mining in the narrow sense of searching databases to find anomalous patterns that could be indicative of terrorist activity. So the latest ODNI annual report to Congress (pdf) on data mining programs (the third such report) has little new information to […]
Click image for large version . By Hans M. Kristensen The Chinese navy has constructed what appears to be a demagnetization facility near an East Sea Fleet submarine base. The facility is the second spotted at Chinese naval bases since 2008. Chinese Naval Demagnetization Facilities The new demagnetization facility is located less than 10 km […]
President Obama’s deadline to address concerns about Tehran’s nuclear program passed at the end of 2009, so the White House is moving to harsher sanctions. But the U.S. is having trouble rallying the needed international support because Iranian intentions remain ambiguous.
The national security classification system hit some new highs as well as some new lows over the last year, the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) disclosed in its latest annual report to the President (pdf). The total number of reported national security classification actions skyrocketed to a record 54.8 million classifications last year, a startling […]
Thomas A. Drake, a former National Security Agency official, was indicted yesterday after allegedly having disclosed classified information to a reporter for a national newspaper “who wrote newspaper articles about the NSA and its intelligence activities in 2006 and 2007.” The reporter and the newspaper were not named. Mr. Drake allegedly provided classified documents to […]
“The historic, sustained rise in [the U.S. prison population] has broad implications, not just for the criminal justice system, but for the larger economy. About 770,000 people worked in the corrections sector in 2008 [and this number is expected to grow]…. By comparison, in 2008 there were 880,000 workers in the entire U.S. auto manufacturing […]
The Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG) is a group of non-governmental scientists who advise the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) on activities to counter biological threats and weapons. Aside from the fact of its existence, nearly everything about the group is classified, but a few details of the enterprise have lately emerged. The BSEG is supposed […]