I’m Michael Stebbins; my group focuses on biosecurity issues and national policy as it relates to health and biological sciences. These two areas have melded together in a number of ways since the anthrax attacks in 2001. First, there was a dramatic increase in research on bioterrorism threat agents including anthrax, tularemia, and plague. With […]
My name is Matt Schroeder and I am the manager of the FAS’ Arms Sales Monitoring Project (ASMP). Since 1991, the ASMP has worked to increase transparency, accountability and restraint in the arms trade, and to end the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons. To that end, we do original research on arms […]
Puzzled by references to non-disclosure agreements signed by reporters who are embedded with U.S. military forces, Secrecy News requested a copy of such a non-disclosure agreement from the Pentagon. But there isn’t one. “The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs has advised this Office that there is no non-disclosure agreement for […]
A layman might suppose that in the United States a telephone conversation cannot be intercepted by an intelligence agency such as the NSA except in compliance with the laws and guidelines governing intelligence collection. But it’s more complicated than that because “interception” is not considered “collection,” according to a Department of Defense regulation. “Information shall […]
In a 2002 statement presented to the Senate Intelligence Committee, James A. Baker of the Justice Department Office of Intelligence Policy and Review questioned the constitutionality and the necessity of a proposal by Senator Mike DeWine to lower the legal threshold for domestic intelligence surveillance of non-U.S. persons from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion.” But […]
Welcome to this latest FAS experiment in blogging. We hope it will provide you with some insight into our activities and offer us another channel for presenting our work and our observations on strategic security and everything that entails, which is… a lot. I’m Steven Aftergood, and I focus on secrecy and intelligence policy. The […]
Welcome to the inauguration of the Federation of American Scientists’ Web Log on national security issues. We are very excited about this new blog. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was founded by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bombs. The birth of the atomic bomb was, or course, […]
The National Security Agency has 46 million pages of historically valuable classified records more than 25 years old that are subject to automatic declassification by the end of December 2006, according to a new NSA declassification plan. Another 4.5 million pages of 25 year old records have been categorically exempted from automatic declassification because they […]
To promote intelligence accountability in new democracies and elsewhere, a new publication addresses the principles of intelligence oversight and presents draft legal provisions to govern intelligence. The document is being published in seven languages from Albanian to Ukrainian. See “Making Intelligence Accountable: Legal Standards and Best Practice for Oversight of Intelligence Agencies” by Hans Born […]
In a startling pronouncement that can only heighten tensions between the press and the government, a federal judge said last week that the laws governing classified information apply to anyone who is in receipt of such information, including reporters who are the recipients of “leaks.” “Persons who have unauthorized possession, who come into unauthorized possession […]
The Bush Administration rejected a Congressional initiative in 2002 that would have lowered the legal threshold for conducting surveillance of non-US persons under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from “probable cause” that the target is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power to “reasonable suspicion.” Administration officials said at the time that the legislative […]
The Central Intelligence Agency has selectively declined to publish on its web site at least three unclassified reports produced by the Center for the Study of Intelligence that present an unflattering picture of the Agency, US News reported this week. See “A Tangled Web Woven,” by David E. Kaplan, US News and World Report, January […]