Transparency is essential for effective congressional and public oversight of the arms trade, and the US government is widely (and rightly) praised for its reporting on arms exports. Yet there is also significant room for improvement. Reporting on US arms exports and international arms transfers funded or authorized by the US government is often incomplete, […]
In a December 29 Order published in the Federal Register yesterday, President Obama designated more than two dozen officials as “original classification authorities” (OCAs) who have the power to classify information as Top Secret or Secret, and (in most cases) to delegate such authority to their subordinates. The new list of authorized classifiers contains only […]
Noteworthy new Congressional Research Service reports obtained by Secrecy News include the following (all pdf). “Military Service Records and Unit Histories: A Guide to Locating Sources,” December 16, 2009. “California Drought: Hydrological and Regulatory Water Supply Issues,” December 7, 2009. “Government Collection of Private Information: Background and Issues Related to the USA PATRTIOT Act Reauthorization,” […]
Iran’s state-run television organization known as the IRIB is profiled in a new report (pdf) from the DNI Open Source Center. The rather massive IRIB employs an estimated 46,000 persons, according to the OSC report, and has a reported budget of $900 million. It offers a vast network of internal and external channels, which collectively […]
Happy New Year. We at FAS are a serious, hard-working lot but I thought I would start the year with a blog somewhat less Earth-shattering than we normally do. The following is the result of some research made possible by free time over the holidays. It is with a combination of despair and delight that […]
For the first time, each executive branch agency that classifies information will be required to perform “a comprehensive review” of its internal classification guides to validate them and “to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified.” The new requirement is one of the most potentially significant features of an Executive […]
There has been almost no criticism of the new Obama Executive Order on national security classification, which itself is kind of troubling. For a full-throated denunciation, one has to turn to the outer periphery of Newsmax.com, which argues that declassification of historical editions of the President’s Daily Brief “will render impotent one of the intelligence […]
A five-month long investigation by the Government Accountability Office determined that the inadvertent publication of a 267 page document describing U.S. civilian nuclear research facilities caused no damage to national security and did not require any remedial security measures at the cited facilities. Yet surprisingly, even though its publication had no adverse consequences at all, […]
A new draft executive order on national security classification and declassification policy is expected to be presented to President Obama this week for his personal resolution of issues which remain in dispute among policymakers and affected agencies, especially intelligence agencies. This marks the first time since the first Bush Administration, nearly two decades ago, that […]
The U.S. State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series had another disappointing year in 2009 with only two softcopy volumes published to date, including one released last week on “Global Issues, 1973-1976.” The FRUS series is supposed to provide “comprehensive documentation of the major foreign policy decisions and actions of the […]
An Israeli-American attorney who worked for the FBI as a translator pled guilty yesterday to unlawfully disclosing five classified FBI documents to an unidentified blogger last April, who then published information from the documents on his blog, the Justice Department announced. In a signed plea agreement, Shamai Leibowitz stipulated that he had “knowingly and willfully […]
After a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) manual containing “sensitive security information” was inadvertently disclosed on a government website, it was reposted on several non-governmental websites where it remains freely available. Asked what TSA intends to do about that, Acting TSA Administrator Gale D. Rossides told Congress that her agency does not have the legal authority […]