One of the lacunae in the history of defense policy and science advice to government concerns the role of the JASON advisory panel. A fascinating new book on the JASONs helps to fill in that mysterious gap. Established in 1960, the JASONs first gained unwelcome public attention as the result of a reference in the […]
An ambitious bill (pdf) to promote an entire menu of “good government” reforms in the executive branch was endorsed on a bipartisan basis in the House Government Reform Committee today and reported to the full House. The bill would notably limit the use of “pseudo-classification” markings such as “sensitive but unclassified” and “for official use […]
An earlier FAS blog entry analyzed, and criticized, proposed legislation that grants the Bush Administration pre-approval of the details of an eventual nuclear trade deal with India. FAS has also organized a petition campaign to encourage members of Congress to vote against the legislation. (And blog readers are encouraged to sign the petition.) The Times […]
Of the 13,000 entries in the Pentagon’s TALON database of potential threats to the Department of Defense facilities and personnel, some two percent did not involve threats and should not have been retained, Pentagon officials acknowledged yesterday. The TALON system “should be used only to report information regarding international terrorist activity,” said Deputy Defense Secretary […]
The implications of increasing government secrecy are examined in a special issue of “I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society.” A series of articles, mainly academic in tenor, address both the “theory” and the practice of secrecy from various perspectives and on topics such as Biosecurity and Secrecy Policy, for example. […]
President Bush specifically authorized Vice Presidential aide Scooter Libby to disclose information from a classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003, effectively declassifying the information, according to a government filing (pdf) in the Libby prosecution yesterday. “Defendant’s [i.e. Libby’s] participation in a critical conversation with Judith Miller […]
Yesterday, the Senate passed a whopping $107 billion Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill to fund the war in Iraq. Attached to the bill was an amendment by Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) that adds $2.3 billion to prepare for an influenza pandemic. Such money will also prepare the country for other public health emergencies and is a […]
Government attorneys presented a robust justification of their decision to prosecute two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for mishandling classified information in a supplemental brief (pdf) filed in the case last week. “In the final analysis, this case is not about free speech, foreign policy lobbying, or petitioning the government,” […]
On March 9, the President signed into law the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act, which made permanent 14 of the 16 sections of the Patriot Act that were set to expire. A new report from the Congressional Research Service provides a detailed, 74 page analysis (pdf) of the Act, including the various modifications made […]
The threat posed by organized crime networks to national security and international stability, and U.S. policy responses to the threat, are examined by the Congressional Research Service in a new report (pdf) obtained by Secrecy News. “Starting in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization, many criminal organizations […]
The total amount of U.S. aid to Iraq since 2003 is already comparable to post-World War II U.S. assistance to Germany and nearly double that provided to Japan, according to a new Congressional Research Service analysis (pdf). “U.S. assistance to Germany totaled some $4.3 billion ($29.6 billion in 2005 dollars) for the years of direct […]
Update (February 22, 2007): DTRA announces that Divine Strake has been canceled. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) today confirmed to FAS that the upcoming Divine Strake test widely reported in the media to be a non-nuclear event is in fact a low-yield nuclear weapons calibration simulation against an underground target. A few, including Albuquerque […]