On Thursday, Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) introduced a new bill that would require the Pentagon to establish a pilot program “to determine the feasibility and desirability” of equipping turbojet planes in the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) with anti-missile systems. The CRAF is a Defense Department program that draws on civilian passenger and cargo aircraft […]
Although it “has stirred significant controversy in recent years,” the Congressional Research Service policy of restricting direct dissemination of its products to members of Congress is well-founded, argued CRS director Daniel P. Mulhollan in a lengthy internal memorandum (pdf) last month. “The reasons for limiting public distribution of our work can be summarized as follows,” […]
For now, the Congressional Research Service still does not make its products directly available to the public. Americans who want online access to CRS reports have to make their own arrangements. Some noteworthy new CRS reports obtained by Secrecy News include the following (all pdf). “Defense: FY2008 Authorization and Appropriations,” May 11, 2007. “Nuclear Weapons: […]
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration earlier this year attempted to block public access to a comprehensive report on planetary defense against asteroids, but the document found its way into the public domain anyway. NASA undertook the study in response to a 2005 Congressional mandate “to provide an analysis of alternatives to detect, track, catalogue, […]
The identification of deceased military and civilian personnel killed on or around the battlefield is one of the grim functions routinely performed in wartime. It is so grim, in fact, that the U.S. Army decided it should be shielded from public awareness. A U.S. Army Field Manual on “Identification of Deceased Personnel” (large pdf) was […]
The presiding judge in the closely-watched prosecution of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) charged with unlawfully receiving national defense information has denied a defense motion to dismiss the case on grounds of alleged constitutional violations by the government. The defense had argued that the case should be dismissed because […]
One new feature of the intelligence budgeting process is the mandatory public disclosure of “earmarks” — funds that are specifically requested by an individual member of Congress and designated for a particular program. The disclosures shed at least a few photons worth of new light on the deliberately obscure intelligence budget. More than two dozen […]
“Arms Control and Nonproliferation Technologies” (ACNT) was the name of a now-defunct Department of Energy journal that sought to inform policy makers about the capacities and limitations of arms control-related technologies. At its best, ACNT provided a foundation for clear thinking about arms control and an intelligible introduction to the technologies involved. It has been […]
In reporting on our unauthorized reproduction of Army publications, as noted yesterday, Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote an article entitled “Put Steven Aftergood in the Brig.” He was way out of line, wrote Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Let’s get our prisons straight. A Brig is a ship’s or Navy/Marine prison and to […]
U.S. intelligence recently undertook a “significant” covert action without notifying Congress, as required by law, the House Intelligence Committee disclosed in a new report on the 2008 intelligence authorization bill. “The Committee was dismayed at a recent incident wherein the Intelligence Community failed to inform the Congress of a significant covert action activity. This failure […]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is sponsoring a public conference on open source intelligence in Washington, DC on July 16-17. “The conference will raise awareness about open source and encourage information sharing among the Intelligence Community and its partners in academia, think tanks, private industry, and with federal, state, local and tribal […]
In an interview with the Associated Press, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency warned that under certain circumstances the government might seek to restrict the dissemination of commercial satellite imagery. See “Curbs on satellite photos may be needed” by Katherine Shrader, Associated Press, May 8. A 2005 satellite image shows what appear to be […]