Noteworthy new publications from the Congressional Research Service include the following. Presidential Transition Act: Provisions and Funding, November 13, 2020 Federal Scientific Integrity Policies: A Primer, November 20, 2020 The Digital Divide: What Is It, Where Is It, and Federal Assistance Programs, November 17, 2020 Vaccine Safety in the United States: Overview and Considerations for COVID-19 […]
Last June the Department of Defense denied an application for security clearance for access to classified information because the applicant had “delinquent debts totaling about $24,000.” In May, a defense contractor was denied a security clearance based on delinquent debts totaling $87,517. In fact, excessive personal debt is among the most commonly cited reasons for denying or revoking access […]
Last January the Trump Administration formally notified Congress under the War Powers Act of a US drone strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. But unlike all known prior War Powers Act notifications, the report on the Soleimani killing was classified in its entirety. (Previous reports sometimes included a classified annex together with the unclassified notification.) […]
Updated below The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) boasts an amazing record of achievement but its future is in jeopardy, according to a newly disclosed report of the Naval Research Advisory Committee that was suppressed by the Navy. NRL is widely recognized as a world class research institution that has made transformational discoveries in many scientific fields from space science […]
Among the lesser known consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago was that it triggered a race between Hollywood movie studios MGM and Paramount to bring the story of the atomic bomb — or at least some commercialized version of it — to the American public as a major motion picture. […]
Of the 17,645 deaths of U.S. military personnel in all countries since 2006, a full 24% of them were “self-inflicted,” according to updated data from the Department of Defense as reported by the Congressional Research Service. “Self-inflicted” here means suicide as well as death due to alcohol or substance abuse. See Trends in Active-Duty Military Deaths […]
Obsolete secrecy procedures and growing political abuse have left the national security classification system in a state of disarray and dysfunction. Most government agencies “still rely on antiquated information security management practices,” according to a new annual report from the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). “These practices have not kept pace with the volume of […]
How can the national security classification and declassification system be fixed? That depends on how one defines the problem that needs fixing. To the authors of a new report from the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), the outstanding problem is the difficulty of managing the expanding volume of classified information and declassifying a growing backlog of records. “There is […]
The Department of Defense is asking Congress to expand its authority to recall retired members of the military to active duty in the event of a war or national emergency. The DoD proposal predates the turmoil that followed the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis last week and the activation of National […]
The US Air Force wants to renew and expand the withdrawal of public land for the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR), where it conducts flight testing, classified research and development projects, and weapons tests. A Defense Department proposal to Congress would increase the amount of land currently withdrawn from public use by more than 10 […]
In 2018 the Census Bureau discovered that results of the 2010 census could be processed and matched with external sources in such a way as to reveal confidential personal information, in violation of the law. “This had not been thought to be feasible owing to the large amount of data and computation involved,” a new report from […]
The threat to public safety from unmanned aerial systems (drones) is not just foreseeable — it already exists in the form of numerous near-collisions with manned aircraft, a new report from the Congressional Research Service observes. “Between 2016 and 2019, airline pilots reported, on average, more than 100 drone sightings per month to FAA, and […]