A new Zogby poll came out today. What is getting coverage in a New York Times article is that 72% of U.S. soldiers in Iraq believe we should substantially withdraw sooner rather than later. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, I have been to Iraq, and I would want to come home, too. But what did surprise […]
FAS has just released our internet resource for biosecurity policy, bioterrorism information, and biodefense research. The site includes an interactive map that provides the locations of both operational and planned laboratories in the U.S. The organizations linked on the site present a wide array of perspectives on what actions individual scientists, research institutions, science journals, […]
Anyone can purchase a copy of the 1958 Department of Defense “Emergency Plans Book,” an early cold war description of response planning for a nuclear attack on the United States. It is available for sale through Amazon.com and elsewhere under the somewhat lurid title “The Doomsday Scenario” (Motorbooks International, 2002). But don’t look for it […]
Confronted by a government that seems intent on erecting unnecessary new barriers to public access, members of the public are not entirely without resources to oppose such barriers, and even to overcome them. “Decrying secrecy, citizen groups fight back” is the thrilling headline of a story by reporter Aliya Sternstein in Federal Computer Week today […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated and revised its policy on “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU) information, the increasingly common twilight category of information that is neither classified nor publicly released. “Marking information SBU does not automatically qualify it for a public release exemption,” the CDC policy observes. (There is no “SBU […]
A new review of Russian nuclear forces published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says that the Kremlin appears to be attempting to reassert its nuclear strength after years of decline in order to underscore Russia’s status as a powerful nation. Large-scale exercises have been reinstated and modernizations of nuclear forces continue with reports […]
Responding to a February 21 New York Times story indicating that thousands of declassified documents had been reclassified by executive branch agencies and removed from public access in questionable circumstances, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced yesterday that an official investigation into the matter was underway. An audit is being conducted by the […]
Could the National Security Archive be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for publishing historical documents that U.S. intelligence agencies now say are classified? Could Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice be detained for continuing to publish historical intelligence records on the State Department web site that the CIA has flagged as classified? Could thousands of historians […]
The Department of Justice described its progress towards meeting the December 31, 2006 deadline for automatic declassification of 25 year old historical records in an updated Declassification Plan submitted to the Information Security Oversight Office last year. Significant exemptions to the automatic declassification program have been sought by the FBI and the DoJ Office of […]
Some notable, newly updated reports of the Congressional Research Service, obtained by Secrecy News and published on the Federation of American Scientists web site, include the following: “Conventional Warheads For Long-Range Ballistic Missiles: Background and Issues for Congress,” updated February 13, 2006. “U.S. Nuclear Weapons: Changes in Policy and Force Structure,” updated January 27, 2006. […]
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing,” according to a paper published in the latest issue of Science magazine. Unconscious thought, defined as “thought or deliberation in the absence of conscious attention directed at the problem,” can sometimes yield superior results, University of Amsterdam psychologists […]
Several reports of the Congressional Research Service on nuclear weapons policy have recently been updated, including the following: “Nuclear Weapons: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” updated January 23, 2006. “North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons Program,” updated January 17, 2006. “Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons,” updated January 13, 2006. “Nuclear Arms Control: The U.S.-Russian Agenda,” updated January 3, 2006.