The US Constitution leaves many basic questions of constitutional law unanswered, whether because they could not be anticipated or because the text is broadly worded or ambiguous. Consequently, “Interpretation is necessary to determine the meaning of ambiguous provisions of the Constitution or to answer fundamental questions left unaddressed by the drafters,” a new report from the […]
Last year, the Congressional Research Service generated more than 1,100 new products and and updated 2,100 others, according to a new CRS annual report to Congress. The annual report describes the Service’s structure, operation, recent activities and new initiatives. It scarcely mentions thorny issues such as the adequacy of the CRS budget, or the challenges posed […]
The National Declassification Center released a listing of 134 record collections that have undergone declassification review in the past five months. The collections include records on the Weapons System Evaluations Group (discussed here), a compilation of records assembled by Judge Merrick Garland when he was special assistant to the attorney general in 1979-81 (discussed here), embassy files from Indonesia, Iraq, and […]
Updated below The US Air Force is suspending media embeds, base visits and interviews “until further notice” and it “will temporarily limit the number and type of public engagements” by public affairs officers and others while they are retrained to protect sensitive information, according to guidance obtained by Defense News. “In line with the new National […]
House Democrats have introduced two resolutions in the current Congress to censure the President. Neither resolution is expected to advance. But a new memo from the Congressional Research Service considers whether such resolutions are permissible in practice, and concludes: “It would appear that Congress may censure the President through a simple (one chamber) or concurrent (two chamber) resolution, or other […]
The National Declassification Center is preparing to release a set of newly declassified records concerning a little-known Pentagon advisory group called the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) that operated from 1948 to 1976. The purpose of the WSEG was “to provide rigorous, unprejudiced and independent analyses and evaluations of present and future weapons systems under […]
In January, the Department of Defense ordered the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) not to publish certain data on areas of Afghanistan that were held by insurgents. “This development is troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this is the first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not […]
The Congressional Research Service recently updated its report on US nuclear weapons and programs. See U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues by Amy F. Woolf, March 6, 2018. That is also the subject of a new survey prepared by Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris of the Federation of American Scientists. See […]
Members of Congress are urging the executive branch to update and expand the security clearance process by examining the social media presence of individuals who are being considered for a security clearance for access to classified information, which is now being done only on a limited and uneven basis. “I put more effort into understanding […]
The National Archives said last week that it will gather tens of millions of pages of classified historical records from Presidential Libraries around the country and will bring them to Washington, DC for declassification review. “We are making this change to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the safeguarding and the declassification of this material […]
The Department of Defense has decided to classify previously public information regarding future flight tests of ballistic missile defense systems and components. Information about pending missile defense flight tests, their objectives, and their timing had previously been included in each year’s budget request documents. But that is no longer the case, and such information was […]
The possibility of mobilizing members of the public to collect information — “crowdsourcing” — to enhance verification of international nuclear safeguards is explored in a new report from Sandia National Laboratories. “Our analysis indicates that there are ways for the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to utilize data from crowdsourcing activities to support safeguards verification,” the […]