SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 18
February 9, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/


** MORE TURMOIL AT THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE
** CIA CAN'T CONFIRM OR DENY MUCH AT ALL
** NAVY POLICY ON RELEASE OF NUCLEAR INFORMATION
** CONDUCTING FOREIGN RELATIONS WITHOUT AUTHORITY (CRS)


MORE TURMOIL AT THE CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE

A long-simmering dispute over the role and character of the
Congressional Research Service now threatens to boil over in the
form of a clash between CRS management and CRS analyst Louis
Fisher.

Fisher, a specialist in American government and separation of
powers issues, is one of the superstars of the CRS, whose work is
widely cited and universally respected by his academic colleagues.

He "is a national treasure, the foremost expert on the
constitutional law of the presidency," wrote George C. Edwards
III, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M
University in a letter to the Librarian of Congress last week. He
"is widely regarded as the nation's preeminent expert on the
institutional powers of Congress and the presidency" according to
Cornell W. Clayton of Washington State University.

Now Fisher, age 71, is in trouble at CRS for having expressed
views critical of Bush Administration policy.

See "Expert on Congress's Power Claims He Was Muzzled for Faulting
Bush" by Yochi Dreazen, Wall Street Journal, February 9:

http://tinyurl.com/dju45

The roots of the dispute go back several years and derive from an
unresolved disagreement about the proper function of the CRS, and
the nature of analytical objectivity.

"We must all see to it that our ability to serve the Congress... is
not compromised by even the appearance that we have our own agenda
as an agency; that one or more of our analysts might be seen as so
set in their personal views that they are no longer to be trusted
to provide objective research and analysis; or that some have
developed a reputation for supporting a position on an issue to
the extent that CRS is rendered 'suspect' to those on the other
side," wrote CRS Director Daniel P. Mulhollan in a January 23,
2004 Director's Statement:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mul012304.pdf

That statement set off alarm bells among CRS analysts.

"No one disputes that our work must be non-partisan," wrote Louis
Fisher in a reply to Director Mulhollan at the time. "But if the
front office puts the emphasis on neutrality, balance, and
even-handedness, there is little room for careful, expert
analysis."

"Most of the criticism of our work that I am familiar with, from
CRS staff and Congress, is that our reports are too diffuse and
rambling, without theme, direction, or conclusion. If lawmakers
merely want background material to give them a starting point, a
descriptive CRS product can be helpful. For deeper and more
thoughtful analysis, Congress may decide it has to go elsewhere,"
Fisher wrote.

See his January 31, 2004 memo on CRS Standards for Analysis here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/fisher013104.pdf

The uncertain premise of the dispute is that Congress desires deep
and thoughtful analysis. What complicates matters further is that
in many cases, as they say on the Comedy Channel, "the facts are
biased" against the Bush Administration.

See also "Hoekstra attacks CRS 'bias' on spy program" by Shaun
Waterman, United Press International, February 9:

http://tinyurl.com/9txzf


CIA CAN'T CONFIRM OR DENY MUCH AT ALL

The Central Intelligence Agency continues to make a mockery of its
legal obligations under the Freedom of Information Act and the
national security classification system.

The Project on Government Oversight recently asked the CIA to
undertake a declassification review of the December 2002 Iraqi
declaration on weapons of mass destruction that was presented to
the United Nations Security Council.

Incredibly, CIA official Scott Koch rejected the request by
claiming that "the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence
or nonexistence of records responsive to your request."

See "We Know That You Know" on the POGO blog:

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2006/02/w...ow_that_yo.html

A copy of the Table of Contents from the 12,000 page Iraqi
declaration, which plainly does exist, was obtained by Secrecy
News and may be found here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2002/12/iraq120702.pdf


NAVY POLICY ON RELEASE OF NUCLEAR INFORMATION

Navy personnel are forbidden to disclose or even discuss the
presence or absence of nuclear weapons aboard any U.S. Navy
vessel, according to a new Navy Instruction.

"Military members and civilian employees of the Department of the
Navy shall not reveal, purport to reveal, or cause to be revealed
any information, rumor, or speculation with respect to the
presence or absence of nuclear weapons or components on board any
specific ship, station or aircraft, either on their own initiative
or in response, direct or indirect, to any inquiry."

See OPNAV Instruction 5721.1F, "Release of Information on Nuclear
Weapons and on Nuclear Capabilities of U.S. Forces," February 3:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/navy/opnavinst/5721_1f.pdf

The new Instruction was first spotted by Hans Kristensen of the
Federation of American Scientists.

See his paper "The Neither Confirm Nor Deny Policy: Nuclear
Diplomacy at Work," February 2006:

http://www.nukestrat.com/pubs/NCND.pdf


CONDUCTING FOREIGN RELATIONS WITHOUT AUTHORITY (CRS)

The Logan Act, which became law in 1799, generally prohibits U.S.
citizens from engaging in freelance diplomacy with foreign
governments.

The Act is the subject of a new report from the Congressional
Research Service.

"Although it appears that there has never been a prosecution under
the Logan Act, there have been several judicial references to it,
indicating that the Act has not been forgotten and that it is at
least a potential point of challenge ... against anyone who
without authority allegedly interferes in the foreign relations of
the United States."

See "Conducting Foreign Relations Without Authority: The Logan
Act," February 1, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33265.pdf



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

Secrecy News
From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 19
February 11, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** THE AIPAC CASE: CRIMINALIZING PUBLIC SPEECH


THE AIPAC CASE: CRIMINALIZING PUBLIC SPEECH

In an unprecedented and previously unimaginable case, two former
employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee were
accused last year of mishandling classified government
information. Now they are asking a federal court to dismiss the
charges against them.

The prosecution of the former AIPAC officials, Steven J. Rosen and
Keith Weissman, represents an extraordinary attempt by the Bush
Administration to use the Espionage Act to restrict the
activities and even the conversations of members of the public
who are not government employees.

"The prosecutors in this case have taken the unprecedented step of
criminalizing an alleged leak not just against the government
official who was charged with protecting such information, but
also members of public policy organization with First Amendment
protection who listened to what this government official had to
say," the new defense motion to dismiss states.

"If this indictment is allowed to stand, a statute which in the
first instance is intended to address classic spying will not
only be applied to erring government officials but now will be
applied to private American citizens pursuing first amendment
protected activities."

What Rosen and Weissman are charged with is nothing more than
"what members of the media, members of the Washington policy
community, lobbyists and members of congressional staffs do
perhaps hundreds of times every day," the defense says.

There is no allegation that Rosen or Weissman "ever stole,
secreted, purloined, paid for or otherwise obtained classified
information from any person -- inside or outside government -- by
any illegal means."

Instead, they listened to, and repeated, information provided by
former Pentagon official Lawrence A. Franklin that was
purportedly classified.

"Never has a lobbyist, reporter, or any other non-government
employee been charged... for receiving oral information the
government alleges to be national defense material as part of
that person's normal First Amendment protected activities."

"The government's construction of [the Espionage Act] would allow
for the punishment of any private citizen who obtains classified
information -- regardless of how or why -- and then discloses it
to another private citizen."

"Such a result would be profoundly disturbing," according to the
Defendants' motion.

Remarkably, the legal memorandum on behalf of the defendants was
co-authored by Viet Dinh, the former Justice Department attorney
who is best known as one of the architects of the USA Patriot
Act.

The defense memorandum was filed under seal on January 19 and
unsealed by the court in the Eastern District of Virginia on
February 9.

A copy was obtained by Secrecy News and posted on the Federation
of American Scientists web site. See (4.2 MB PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/rosen011906.pdf



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 21
February 16, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/


** CONFRONTING THE WHITE HOUSE'S "MONARCHICAL DOCTRINE"
** THE VICE PRESIDENT'S DECLASSIFICATION AUTHORITY
** ENERGY DEPARTMENT DECLASSIFICATION PLAN
** IN THE NEWS
** HEARING ON ABLE DANGER
** CRS ON DATA MINING


CONFRONTING THE WHITE HOUSE'S "MONARCHICAL DOCTRINE"

More and more Americans of all political stripes are concerned that the
Bush Administration has exceeded its legal authority by conducting
intelligence surveillance outside of what the law permits.

Anxiety over illegal surveillance is heightened by the prospect that an
ideologically subservient Congress may not insist on the primacy of
law, but will simply defer to the Administration, or authorize whatever
the White House wishes.

"The administration's stance that warrantless surveillance by the
National Security Agency targeting American citizens on American soil
is a legal exercise of the president's inherent powers as commander in
chief, even though it violates the clear language of the 1978 Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act" is a "monarchical doctrine," wrote
columnist George Will today.

"Monarchical" is a curse word in conservative thought, and for an
American conservative monarchy is a provocation to revolutionary
opposition.

"We cannot continue to claim we are a nation of laws and not of men if
our laws, and indeed even the Constitution of the United States itself,
may be summarily breached because of some determination of expediency
or because the President says, 'Trust me'," said Sen. Robert Byrd in a
Senate floor statement yesterday.

"I plead with the American public to tune in to what is happening in
this country. Please forget the political party with which you may
usually be associated and, instead, think about the right of due
process, the presumption of innocence, and the right to a private
life."

"This President, in my judgment, may have broken the law and most
certainly has violated the spirit of the Constitution and the public
trust," Sen. Byrd said.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/byrd021506.html

In an unusual rebuke, the American Bar Association this week found it
necessary to urge President Bush to comply with the law.

"The American Bar Association calls upon the President to abide by the
limitations which the Constitution imposes on a president under our
system of checks and balances and respect the essential roles of the
Congress and the judicial branch in ensuring that our national security
is protected in a manner consistent with constitutional guarantees."

See the report of the American Bar Association Task Force on Domestic
Surveillance in the Fight Against Terrorism:

http://www.abanet.org/op/domsurv/


THE VICE PRESIDENT'S DECLASSIFICATION AUTHORITY

"Is it your view that a Vice President has the authority to declassify
information?" Vice President Cheney was asked yesterday by Fox News'
Brit Hume.

"There is an executive order to that effect," replied the Vice
President.

This was a simple answer to a straightforward question, but the matter
is actually a bit more complicated.

The executive order in question is E.O. 13292 on classified national
security information, issued by President Bush in March 2003:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/bush/eoamend.html

It states in section 1.3 that "The authority to classify information
originally may be exercised only by: (1) the President and, in the
performance of executive duties, the Vice President; (2) agency heads
and officials designated by the President in the Federal Register..."

Remarkably, the phrase "and, in the performance of executive duties, the
Vice President," which dramatically elevates the Vice President's
classification authority to that of the President, was added to the
executive order in 2003.

Prior to that, the Vice President only had classification authority
comparable to that of an agency head, having been delegated such
authority in a 1995 presidential order:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/clinton/oca.html

So much for classification authority. What about declassification?

Declassification authority is defined in Section 6.1(l) of E.O. 13292.
It is granted to: "(1) the official who authorized the original
classification...; (2) the originator's current successor in function;
(3) a supervisory official of either; or (4) officials delegated
declassification authority in writing by the agency head or the senior
agency official."

So the Vice President has authority to declassify anything that he
himself classified. He also clearly has authority to declassify
anything generated in the Office of the Vice President, which he
supervises.

But is the Vice President, like the President, "a supervisory official"
with respect to other executive branch agencies such as the CIA? Did
the 2003 amendment to the executive order which elevated the Vice
President's classification authority also grant him declassification
authority comparable to the President's?

"The answer is not obvious," said one executive branch expert on
classification policy.


ENERGY DEPARTMENT DECLASSIFICATION PLAN

The Department of Energy expects to complete the declassification review
of 12.7 million pages of its 25 year old historically valuable
permanent records by December 31, 2006, the Department advised the
Information Security Oversight Office last month.

The January 2006 Department of Energy Declassification Plan was obtained
under the Freedom of Information Act by Michael Ravnitzky. A copy is
posted here (1.1 MB PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/declass.pdf


IN THE NEWS

"Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the number of insiders alleging wrongdoing
in government - either through whistle-blower channels or directly to
the press - has surged, as have reprisals against them."

See "A surge in whistle-blowing ... and reprisals" by Gail Russell
Chaddock, Christian Science Monitor, February 16, 2006:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0216/p01s01-uspo.html

"If the Bush administration's interpretation of espionage law is upheld,
then everyone is breaking the law, all the time." That's the
conclusion that emerges from the Bush Administration's unprecedented
use of the Espionage Act to prosecute non-government employees for
mishandling classified information.

See "You're a Spy" by Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 15, 2006:

http://www.slate.com/id/2136324/

Jack Shafer sorts out what appeared to be an early post-9/11 disclosure
of warrantless domestic surveillance, and takes a poke at DCIA Porter
Goss for flogging discredited leak allegations.

See "NSA Scoop or Just Bad Writing?" by Jack Shafer, Slate, February 15,
2006:

http://www.slate.com/id/2136184/


HEARING ON ABLE DANGER

The ABLE DANGER data mining program was the subject of a House Armed
Service Committee hearing yesterday featuring testimony from Under
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone.

"Members must decide for themselves what to believe from the testimony
presented today -- there will be some inconsistencies," cautioned Rep.
Jim Saxton, who co-chaired the hearing.

The prepared testimony from that February 15 hearing is posted here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/index.html#ad


CRS ON DATA MINING

A recently updated report from the Congressional Research Service
addresses data mining -- what it is, what it can and cannot do, and
some of the controversies that have arisen around it.

A copy of the CRS report was obtained by Secrecy News.

See "Data Mining and Homeland Security: An Overview," updated January
27, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL31798.pdf




_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 22
February 17, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** ABA URGES REVIEW OF "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED" POLICY
** HOMELAND SECURITY INTELLIGENCE STRATEGIC PLAN
** CRS REPORTS ON CHINA
** IN THE NEWS
** SSCI CONFIRMATION HEARINGS


ABA URGES REVIEW OF "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED" POLICY

The American Bar Association (ABA) adopted a resolution this week
calling on the Attorney General to affirm that designating a record
as "sensitive but unclassified" does not provide a legal basis for
withholding that record.

The ABA also called for establishment of a standardized policy for
employing the "sensitive but unclassified" (SBU) marking.

The increasingly common SBU designation has become problematic
because SBU records are neither fish nor fowl -- neither formally
classified nor publicly available -- and there are no commonly
agreed upon standards for invoking the term.

"Agencies allow the marking of many types of records as SBU. This
patchwork of definitions for safeguarding such records contributes
to confusion regarding whether information should be withheld under
FOIA. Such confusion is exacerbated by the fact that the term SBU is
not derived from an existing FOIA exemption," according to the ABA.

"Our Recommendation seeks the issuance of public guidance from the
U.S. Attorney General, clarifying that the SBU classification does
not constitute grounds for withholding information that would
otherwise be disclosed under FOIA... Such a policy directive would
help to reduce instances of excessive withholding caused by the
confusion and lack of oversight concerning this designation."

See the ABA Resolution (adopted on February 13), along with an
informational report (which was not formally adopted), here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/aba-sbu.pdf

As it happens, a government-wide effort to standardize SBU policy is
now underway, as previously reported (Secrecy News, 12/20/05).


HOMELAND SECURITY INTELLIGENCE STRATEGIC PLAN

Efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to assert itself as a
viable member of the U.S. intelligence community have yielded a new
strategic plan for homeland security intelligence and a management
directive organizing the Department's intelligence activity.

The new strategic plan is a handsome document, but largely devoid of
significant content.

See "DHS Intelligence Enterprise Strategic Plan," January 2006 (3.3
MB PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dhs/stratplan.pdf

And see "Intelligence Integration and Management," DHS Management
Directive 8110, January 30, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dhs/md8110.pdf

Relatedly, "DHS Has Not Implemented an Information Security Program
for Its Intelligence Systems," according to the title of a new DHS
Inspector General report (flagged by BeSpacific.com):

http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/interweb/asse...06-13-Dec05.pdf


CRS REPORTS ON CHINA

Several recently updated reports of the Congressional Research
Service deal with the People's Republic of China, including the
following.

"China and Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Missiles:
Policy Issues," updated January 31, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL31555.pdf

"China's Economic Conditions," updated January 12, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IB98014.pdf

"China's Trade with the United States and the World," updated January
23, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL31403.pdf

"China-U.S. Relations: Current Issues and Implications for U.S.
Policy," updated January 20, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32804.pdf

The use of commercial satellite photographs to identify an
underground Chinese submarine base was reported in the FAS Strategic
Security Blog on February 16:

http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/


IN THE NEWS

In discussing the Vice President's declassification authority
yesterday, we should have noted that some categories of information
are protected by statute, not just by executive order. Such
information, including intelligence sources and methods that are
protected by the National Security Act, cannot simply be
declassified by presidential (or vice presidential) fiat.

The point was made in "The White House's maestro of secrets," Roanoke
Times, February 17:

http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/wb/wb/xp-53021

The AIPAC case, involving the use of the Espionage Act to prosecute
the receipt (and not merely the disclosure) of classified
information, was viewed from Israel in "Washington: Lobbying for
freedom of speech" by Nathan Guttman, Jerusalem Post, February 16:

http://tinyurl.com/8bxjp

"Criticism rained down on Vice President Dick Cheney this week for
failing to disclose his hunting accident to the public for a day,
but advocates of open government said the episode was nothing new.
For five years, they said, Cheney has led the Bush administration's
efforts to curtail the flow of government information."

See "Activists assert secrecy is Cheney's hallmark" by Charlie
Savage, Boston Globe, February 17:

http://tinyurl.com/72pxt


SSCI CONFIRMATION HEARINGS

The records of two confirmation hearings conducted by the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence have just been published: that of
Benjamin A. Powell to be General Counsel in the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, and that of John S. Redd to be
Director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Each contains some interesting details about the nominees, and some
useful questions for the record presenting their views of their
respective positions (in the full PDF versions only, linked within
the pages below).

The hearing record for Mr. Powell, the new ODNI General Counsel, also
features (in the PDF version) a reprint of a technical paper he
co-authored in the journal "Computers and Chemical Engineering"
entitled "Adaptive Networks for Fault Diagnosis and Process
Control."

See the Powell confirmation hearing here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_hr/shrg109-242.html

and the Redd confirmation hearing here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_hr/shrg109-241.html



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@fas.org
voice: (202) 454-4691

February 21, 2006
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."



Copyright 2006The New York Times

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 24
February 21, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

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** RECLASSIFICATION PROGRAM AT NATIONAL ARCHIVES EXPOSED
** CRS ON APPROPRIATION EARMARKS
** A SIXTEENTH MEMBER OF THE US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY


RECLASSIFICATION PROGRAM AT NATIONAL ARCHIVES EXPOSED

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have assigned personnel to
review and reclassify declassified historical records at the
National Archives where they have withdrawn thousands of records
from public access.

The seven year old secret program was reported today on the front
page of the New York Times.

See "U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review" by Scott
Shane, New York Times, February 21:

http://nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html

A detailed examination of the background and conduct of the
reclassification program was prepared by historian Matthew M. Aid
and posted on the web site of the National Security Archive today.

The Archive also posted several documents that have been withdrawn
from public access under the secret review program.

An effort by historians is underway to enlist the Information
Security Oversight Office and congressional oversight committees to
check the unsupervised reclassification activity.

See "Declassification in Reverse: The Pentagon and the U.S.
Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document
Reclassification Program," National Security Archive, February 21:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB179/

"Worried that sensitive information may have been improperly
declassified in the late 1990s, government agencies took to
scrubbing public records at the National Archives and elsewhere,
pulling untold thousands of public records for 'review' and
possible reclassification," I wrote last March in Slate.

"Many 30- or 50-year-old archival collections are a shadow of what
they were just a few years ago."

A National Archives official challenged the accuracy of this claim
at the time, but it now appears to be validated.

See "The Age of Missing Information" by Steven Aftergood, Slate,
March 16, 2005:

http://www.slate.com/id/2114963/


CRS ON APPROPRIATION EARMARKS

The number of earmarks included in congressional appropriations
bills, directing that money be spent in a particular and often
self-interested way, has multiplied over the past decade, according
to a study by the Congressional Research Service.

The CRS study has been widely cited in the press, but has not been
readily available online. Now it is.

See "Earmarks in Appropriation Acts: FY1994, FY1996, FY1998, FY2000,
FY2002, FY2004, FY2005," January 26, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/m012606.pdf


A SIXTEENTH MEMBER OF THE US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

With the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002,
the U.S. intelligence community gained its fifteenth member.

Last week, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) became the
sixteenth member.

"This designation does not grant DEA new authorities, but it does
formalize the long-standing relationship between the DEA and the
IC," according to a February 17 news release from the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence. See:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/02/odni021706.html



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 25
February 22, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** SCHOPENHAUER AND UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT
** CRS ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY
** WASHINGTON POST ON THE AIPAC CASE


SCHOPENHAUER AND UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT

"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 found. And they suggest that the same effect can be
"generalize[d] to other types of choices -- political, managerial,
or otherwise."

See "On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention
Effect" by Ap Dijksterhuis, et al, Science, vol. 311, 17 February
2006 (free abstract):

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5763/1005

So does that mean that the processes of political deliberation
should be restructured to place greater emphasis on intuition and
"hunches"? Not exactly.

The strengths and limits of "unconscious thought" were considered
by author Sue Halpern in a review of Malcolm Gladwell's book
"Blink" in the New York Review of Books (April 28, 2005):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17954

"Intuition is often understood as an antithesis to analytic
decision-making, as something inherently nonanalytic or
preanalytic," Halpern quotes neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg.
"But in reality, intuition is the condensation of vast prior
analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized."

In other words, the productivity of "unconscious thought" is
probably dependent upon all of the conscious thought, analysis and
experience that precedes it.

(Making a similar point, a favorite teacher once advised that "It
is one thing for Aldous Huxley to take LSD," since Huxley was
immensely learned. "It is something else for *you* to do it.")

"The possibility of unconscious thought (as well as the term) was
explicitly used for the first time by Schopenhauer," write
Dijksterhuis et al in their new Science paper.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was also
credited by Freud as a forerunner of psychoanalysis.

"Schopenhauer argued at length, and with a psychological insight
which was altogether unprecedented, that empirical evidence points
to the conclusion not only that most of our thoughts and feelings
are unknown to us but that the reason for this is a process of
repression which is itself unconscious," wrote Bryan Magee in his
magnificent "The Philosophy of Schopenhauer" (Oxford, rev. 1997).

In several respects Schopenhauer was an unsavory character. He had
a bad case of anti-semitism which earned him a favorable mention
in Hitler's Mein Kampf.

But Magee does for Schopenhauer what the late Walter Kaufmann did
for Nietzsche several decades ago -- he makes him intelligible to
the non-specialist reader, as well as interesting and, quite
unexpectedly, important.

Magee served briefly in British intelligence (to return to more
familiar territory) and wrote a quasi-existentialist spy novel
called "To Live in Danger" (1960, long out of print) that is not
entirely bad.


CRS ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY

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:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/IB92099.pdf

"North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program," updated January 17, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/IB91141.pdf

"Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons," updated January 13, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf

"Nuclear Arms Control: The U.S.-Russian Agenda," updated January 3,
2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/IB98030.pdf


WASHINGTON POST ON THE AIPAC CASE

The Washington Post took further note today of the potentially
severe implications for the press of the controversial prosecution
of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC).

"The Bush administration said that journalists can be prosecuted
under current espionage laws for receiving and publishing
classified information but that such a step 'would raise
legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken
lightly,' according to a court filing made public this week," the
Post reported.

See "Press Can Be Prosecuted for Having Secret Files, U.S. Says,"
by Walter Pincus, Washington Post, February 22:

http://tinyurl.com/ng76c



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 26
February 23, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** NATIONAL ARCHIVES RESPONDS TO RECLASSIFICATION
** RECLASSIFICATION AND THE ESPIONAGE ACT
** JUSTICE DEPARTMENT DECLASSIFICATION PLAN
** SELECTED CRS REPORTS ON NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY


NATIONAL ARCHIVES RESPONDS TO RECLASSIFICATION

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 Information Security Oversight
Office, a NARA component, to determine the number of documents that
have been withdrawn, the authorization and justification for the
withdrawal, and the appropriateness of the reclassification action.

(Agencies dispute that any documents have been "reclassified."
Instead, they contend, the withdrawn records were never properly
declassified and so have remained classified all along.)

"The audit will result in a public report designed to provide the
greatest feasible degree of transparency to this classification
activity," NARA said. "It is anticipated that the report will be
available within the next 60 days."

See "The National Archives Responds to Reclassification of
Documents," NARA news release, February 22:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/nara022206.html

The reclassification issue is more than a minor bureaucratic glitch.
It has become a threat to the integrity of the entire national
security classification and declassification program.

It would not be surprising if there were isolated cases of mistaken
declassification. But because many of the now-withdrawn documents
are widely available in the public domain, on the National Security
Archive web site and elsewhere, anyone can see that the authority to
reclassify and remove them has been improperly exercised in many
cases. Government officials have admitted as much.

"If those sample records [reviewed by the Information Security
Oversight Office] were removed because somebody thought they were
classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," ISOO Director Bill Leonard
told the New York Times. "It just boggles the mind."

But if records were mistakenly withdrawn in this case, what confidence
can anyone have that classification authority is being properly
invoked, for example, in the ongoing review of declassified
historical records conducted by the Department of Energy? That
review, conducted under the 1999 Kyl/Lott amendment, has also led to
the removal of many thousands of DOE and other agency records that
supposedly contain classified nuclear weapons information.

And what about Bush Administration classification of present-day
records, which has accelerated to a record high level? How credible
are those classification actions?

Finally, what is the role of the National Archives? Is NARA the
guardian of public access to historical records? Or has it become a
passive accomplice to the classification abuses of other agencies?

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-CT) announced that his House Government
Reform subcommittee on National Security will hold a third hearing on
classification policy on March 14.


RECLASSIFICATION AND THE ESPIONAGE ACT

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 and librarians around the country be
arrested for retaining and circulating volumes of the State
Department's Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series
that are now considered to contain classified documents?

These seem to be silly questions.

And yet the theory of the Espionage Act that has been adopted by the
government in its prosecution of two former officials of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (who are not charged with espionage)
may extend even to silly cases such as these.

The Espionage Act's prohibitions on the unauthorized retention and
transmission of national defense information apply to "whoever" may
violate them, the government insisted in a January 30 motion.

"Whoever means, 'no matter who'," the government contended. "The
statute covers 'anyone'."

Until now, the Espionage Act has never been interpreted this broadly,
and for good reason. Using the Act to penalize the public receipt
and distribution of government information leads to absurd
conclusions.


JUSTICE DEPARTMENT DECLASSIFICATION PLAN

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 Intelligence Policy and
Review. Otherwise some 30 million pages of DoJ records have been
subjected to declassification review in recent years.

A copy of the Plan was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act
by Michael Ravnitzky.

See "2003 Declassification Plan (Revised October 27, 2005)," U.S.
Department of Justice:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doj-declass.pdf


SELECTED CRS REPORTS ON NATIONAL SECURITY POLICY

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:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL33067.pdf

"U.S. Nuclear Weapons: Changes in Policy and Force Structure," updated
January 27, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL31623.pdf

"U.S. Armed Forces Abroad: Selected Congressional Roll Call Votes
Since 1982," updated January 27, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL31693.pdf

"Interrogation of Detainees: Overview of the McCain Amendment,"
updated January 24, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RS22312.pdf




_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 27
February 27, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** FUROR OVER RECLASSIFICATION GROWS
** RESISTANCE TO ONLINE SECRECY BUILDS
** CDC POLICY ON "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED"


FUROR OVER RECLASSIFICATION GROWS

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 at the National Archives, where author L.
Douglas Keeney originally obtained it in 1997, because it is no
longer there. It is among the thousands of government documents
that have been reclassified and withdrawn from public access.

"When I returned in 2005 for another round of research in the
Secretary of the Air Force Files, RG [record group] 340, the
boxes were decimated," Mr. Keeney told Secrecy News. "100% of
the documents I retrieved 9 years ago were gone."

In their place, he found a "withdrawal notice" of the sort that
has been quietly proliferating at the National Archives. An
official stamp ironically certifies that the withdrawal notice
itself is declassified and may be safely disclosed. See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/reclassified.pdf

The documents in this case were removed from public access in
1997, near the beginning of the ongoing reclassification process
that has undermined the integrity of the National Archives.

If it cannot be halted and reversed, bureaucratically-driven
reclassification threatens to reduce the Archives to a mere
repository of officially-sanctioned history.

"Those who control the past control the future, Orwell famously
wrote in '1984'," recalled Fred Kaplan in an article in Slate
that supplied some of the back story of the reclassification
initiative.

See "Secret Again: The absurd scheme to reclassify documents" by
Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 23:

http://www.slate.com/id/2136480/

The continuing assault on history was also reported in "U.S.
reclassifies government memos" by Andrea Mitchell, NBC News,
February 24:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11546531/

"This effort to stuff this harmless toothpaste back into the tube
would be funny if it weren't so emblematic of a disturbing new
culture of government secrecy," a Washington Post editorial
opined. See "Classifying Toothpaste," February 27:

http://tinyurl.com/hykqx


RESISTANCE TO ONLINE SECRECY BUILDS

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 (2/27/06) which explores the withdrawal of
government information from the world wide web, and the public
response.

"More federal agencies are taking data off the Web, while
citizens seek ways to restore public access," as described in
the article. See:

http://www.fcw.com/article92400-02-27-06-Print

"The concerted use of the Freedom of Information Act by public
interest groups and their constituents" offers one way of
recovering public access to official information that has been
removed from government websites, advises law professor and
librarian Susan Nevelow Mart in a new paper.

See "Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information
Removed from the Internet Be Reclaimed?", Law Library Journal,
Volume 98, No. 1 (2006):

http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v98n01/2006-01.pdf


CDC POLICY ON "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED"

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 exemption" to the Freedom of Information Act.)

On the other hand, "the absence of the SBU or other related
marking does not necessarily mean the information should be
publicly released."

"Therefore, all information should be reviewed and approved prior
to its public release," the CDC instructs.

A copy of the revised SBU policy was posted on the CDC intranet
and obtained by Secrecy News. See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/cdc-sbu-2006.html

The Government Accountability Office will publish a major report
on the use of Sensitive But Unclassified control markings next
month.



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 28
March 1, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** CHINA AND NUCLEAR SECRETS
** CRS ON EXON-FLORIO, DEFENSE TRANSFORMATION
** AIPAC COURT DENIES AMICUS STANDING TO REPORTERS COMMITTEE
** PARADE MAGAZINE ON SECRECY


CHINA AND NUCLEAR SECRETS

The intense and occasionally hyperbolic controversy that erupted in
the late 1990s over alleged theft of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets by
the People's Republic of China is revisited in a newly updated report
from the Congressional Research Service.

See "China: Suspected Acquisition of U.S. Nuclear Weapon Secrets,"
updated February 1, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RL30143.pdf

Coincidentally, a Chinese newspaper yesterday accused the United
States of relentlessly seeking to acquire Chinese nuclear secrets.

"In fact, as early as 1955, from the moment China decided to develop
atomic bombs, US intelligence has been doing everything it could,
with whatever means necessary, to gather relevant secret
information," the newspaper article said, presumably correctly.

See "The United States Has Been Probing for China's Nuclear
Intelligence by Various Methods and Whatever Means Necessary" by Yu
Sung, Zhongguo Tongxun She, February 28, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/02/zts022806.html


CRS ON EXON-FLORIO, DEFENSE TRANSFORMATION

The Exon-Florio Act of 1988, which permits the President to block
foreign takeover of certain types of U.S. companies on national
security grounds, has been in the news lately in connection with the
proposed acquisition of six U.S. ports by Dubai Ports World.

Some useful background on that statute is provided by the
Congressional Research Service in "The Exon-Florio National Security
Test for Foreign Investment," updated February 23, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22197.pdf

The substance of the Pentagon's notion of "defense transformation" and
the spin surrounding it are considered in another newly-updated CRS
report.

"Some observers are concerned that the Administration's regular use of
the term transformation has turned the concept of transformation into
an empty slogan or buzz-phrase."

"Other observers are concerned that the Administration has invoked the
term transformation as an all-purpose rhetorical tool for justifying
its various proposals for DOD, whether they relate to transformation
or not, and for encouraging minimal debate on those proposals by
tying the concept of transformation to the urgent need to fight the
war on terrorism."

See "Defense Transformation: Background and Oversight Issues for
Congress," updated February 17, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32238.pdf


AIPAC COURT DENIES AMICUS STANDING TO REPORTERS COMMITTEE

The judge who presides over the prosecution of two former officials
of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for allegedly
mishandling classified information has rejected a request from the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to present an amicus
curiae ("friend of the court") brief on the profound constitutional
concerns raised by the case.

"Defendants are ably and energetically represented by counsel
experienced in all facets of the case, including the constitutional
challenge," wrote Judge T.S. Ellis, III.

"This prosecution is not the appropriate procedural context in which
various elements of society should debate the constitutional validity
or wisdom of [the Espionage Act]," the Judge wrote.

See his February 27, 2006 order here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/aipac022706.pdf

More information on the Reporters Committee view of the case may be
found here:

http://www.rcfp.org/news/releases/20051013-reportersc.html


PARADE MAGAZINE ON SECRECY

Parade Magazine, the Sunday supplement that is inserted into
newspapers all over the country, turned its attention last week from
celebrity romance and dieting tips to the problem of government
secrecy.

"Concerns about overclassification cut across ideological and party
lines," according to Parade.

"Besides alienating Americans from their government, the result is
that many debates today are little more than rhetoric and smears,
because information explaining how a policy was decided isn't
available."

The Parade article serves as a kind of overture to Sunshine Week,
March 13-17, which is an initiative by media organizations and others
to focus public attention on the defects of unchecked government
secrecy (www.sunshineweek.org).

See "Are They Taking Away Our Freedoms?" by Lyric Wallwork Winik,
Parade, February 26:

http://tinyurl.com/qyp2a

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 29
March 3, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** STATE DEPT INTELLIGENCE TRACKED RISING POPULARITY OF HAMAS
** ARCHIVES DECLARES MORATORIUM ON RECLASSIFICATION
** FILE UNDER: SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED


STATE DEPT INTELLIGENCE TRACKED RISING POPULARITY OF HAMAS

"I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas' strong
showing," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, referring to the
landslide victory of the Islamic Hamas party in the January 25
Palestinian elections. Hamas won 76 out of 132 seats in the
Palestinian legislature, compared to 43 seats for the ruling Fatah
party.

"I've asked why nobody saw it coming and I hope that we will take a
hard look, because it does say something about perhaps not having
had a good enough pulse on the Palestinian population," she told
reporters on January 29.

It sounded like a confession of another failure of U.S. intelligence,
having been stymied once again by the intricacies of Middle Eastern
politics.

But despite Secretary Rice's odd protestations, no one did a better
job of tracking the growing popularity of Hamas than the State
Department's own intelligence analysts.

"When the parties [Hamas and Fatah] are directly compared, likely
voters tend to see Hamas as more qualified to clean up corruption,
resist occupation, and uphold societal values," the analysts
reported in a January 19, 2006, pre-election assessment obtained by
Secrecy News.

"A lack of hope in the peace process may also contribute to support
for Hamas. Likely voters who have little or no hope that there will
be a peaceful resolution to the conflict clearly prefer Hamas (30%)
to Fateh (12%)."

Though they did not explicitly predict a Hamas victory, the State
Department intelligence bureau reported on the steady rise in
popular support for the Islamic party, which they said made it newly
competitive with Fatah.

"A just-completed Office of Research survey in the Palestinian
Territories shows a much closer race at the polls than some have
predicted," the assessment stated.

(The Office of Research is a component of the Bureau of the
Intelligence and Research [INR], which is the State Department
intelligence unit.)

"The likely success of Hamas at the polls reflects the long-term rise
of public trust in the party. The proportion in the January survey
who say they trust Hamas matches the historic high of 27%, first
seen in spring 2005, and represents a 6 point increase since
November."

The State Department intelligence assessment is marked "For Official
Use Only."

See "Hamas and Fateh Neck and Neck As Palestinian Elections Near,"
January 19, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/inr/hamas.pdf

("Fateh" is the preferred INR spelling for "Fatah." Due to a
typographical error, the first page of the January 2006 analysis is
dated 2005.)

The State Department's intelligence bureau is widely considered to be
among the most independent-minded and competent members of the U.S.
intelligence community. In 2002, it famously dissented from the
erroneous view that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons
program. Not coincidentally, it is also the least secretive of U.S.
intelligence agencies.


ARCHIVES DECLARES MORATORIUM ON RECLASSIFICATION

In a rather vigorous response to the controversy over the withdrawal of
thousands of declassified historical records from the National
Archives on purported national security grounds, the Archivist of the
United States announced that such withdrawals would be halted, at
least temporarily, while an audit and investigation of the matter is
conducted.

Archivist Allen Weinstein declared a "moratorium" on the removal or
reclassification of "any declassified records currently on the public
shelves at the National Archives until the audit, conducted by the
National Archives Information Security Oversight Office, is complete."

See "Archivist of the United States Announces New Steps in Response to
Withdrawal of Declassified Records from Open Shelves at the National
Archives," news release, March 2:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/03/nara030206.html

See also "Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified Files" by Scott
Shane, New York Times, March 3:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/politics/03archives.html


FILE UNDER: SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED

Lists of radio frequencies assigned to the U.S. Air Force's Civil Air
Patrol (CAP) will henceforth be withheld from public disclosure,
according to a January 2006 memorandum from the CAP National
Commander.

"It has come to our attention that the radio frequency assignments
provided us by the USAF are considered sensitive information and
require protection from unauthorized release," wrote Maj. General
Antonio J. Pineda.

"Such [information] must be removed from public access, such as on
the Web, and may not be released to outside agencies without
coordination," he wrote.

"As we prepare for an increased role in Homeland Security, it is very
likely we will encounter additional information requiring our
protection."

"A rigid stance on information security shows that we continue to be
a professional partner in the defense of our nation," he wrote.

"A rigid stance on information security," of course, is the source
and the driver of a whole set of other problems. But that is beyond
the scope of this memo.

See "Protection of Radio Frequency Information," US Air Force Civil
Air Patrol, January 20, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/01/cap012006.pdf

Also in the sensitive but unclassified (SBU) category is the
Department of Energy's venerable "Unclassified Controlled Nuclear
Information" (UCNI) marking.

Unlike most other SBU designations, UCNI has been defined with some
specificity. Official guidelines spell out exactly what is and what
is not within its proper boundaries.

UCNI is also authorized by statute, not invented out of whole cloth,
and it carries enormous financial penalties for those who disclose
it without authorization. For these reasons, it will be a
particular challenge to integrate UCNI policy into a uniform,
government-wide policy on sensitive but unclassified information.

For official guidance on UCNI, see "Unclassified Controlled Nuclear
Information, General Guideline GG-5," Department of Energy, February
2004:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/ucni.pdf



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.
Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@fas.org
voice: (202) 454-4691

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 30
March 6, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** THE AIPAC CASE: AIDING AND ABETTING LEAKS
** MORE ON NSA WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE
** SOME NEW DOD DIRECTIVES
** JOUSTING OVER THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE


THE AIPAC CASE: AIDING AND ABETTING LEAKS

The most troubling aspect of the prosecution of two former employees
of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for
mishandling classified information is that prosecutors have adopted
an expansive new interpretation of the Espionage Act which could make
criminals of many reporters, lobbyists and advocates who traffic in
government information that may be classified.

But another worrisome feature of the case is that one of the AIPAC
defendants is charged under a separate statute -- 18 U.S.C. 2 --
with "aiding and abetting" an unauthorized disclosure of
information.

(18 U.S.C. 2 states that "Whoever commits an offense against the
United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or
procures its commission, is punishable as a principal.")

The use of this "aiding and abetting" statute multiplies the impact
of the government's new theory of the Espionage Act since it means
that anyone who facilitates or encourages the disclosure of proscribed
information -- as reporters and many others do in the course of their
daily activities -- is as culpable as the one who discloses classified
information without authorization.

"It's called being an 'accessory before the fact'," observed former
CIA analyst Allen Thomson, who flagged the use of this provision
in the AIPAC prosecution. He cited a law dictionary definition
which explained that "an accessory before the fact is one whose
counsel or instigation leads another to commit a crime."

Punishing the solicitation or acquisition of restricted information
could obviously be an effective way to discourage press attention
to matters that the government wishes to conceal.

On the other hand, Mr. Thomson conjectured, the government's "use
of 18 USC 2 against [AIPAC defendant Steven J.] Rosen ... might
provide reporters with a Fifth Amendment basis for refusing to
talk to grand juries" since they could run the risk of
self-incrimination. Any such Fifth Amendment claim could be
defeated by a grant of immunity, however.

See, relatedly, "Pro-Israel Lobbying Group Roiled by Prosecution of
Two Ex-Officials" by Scott Shane and David Johnston, New York
Times, March 5:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/politics/05aipac.html


MORE ON NSA WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE

"In my professional opinion, the NSA domestic surveillance program
is as blatantly illegal a program as I've seen," said Prof. Harold
Hongju Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, at a Senate Judiciary
Committee hearing on February 28.

Others disagreed. "I believe that the inherent authority of the
president under Article II, under these circumstances, permits the
types of intercepts that are being undertaken," said former DCI R.
James Woolsey.

The opening statements from the February 28 hearing on "Wartime
Executive Power and the NSA's Surveillance Authority" may be found
here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/index.html#nsa2

The view that the NSA surveillance activity is illegal was
elaborated in a legal memorandum that was presented to the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court last week by the Center for
National Security Studies and the Constitution Project. See:

http://www.constitutionproject.org/article.cfm?messageID=145

Also last week, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) introduced legislation to
establish "to investigate the instances of warrantless wiretapping
and spying on U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency and
other departments of Government."

See his March 2 introductory statement and the text of his bill
here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/s2362.html


SOME NEW DOD DIRECTIVES

The constant administrative churning of the defense policy process
has yielded several notable new Department of Defense directives
and instructions, such as the following.

U.S. policy on handling classified NATO information is addressed in
"United States Security Authority for North Atlantic Treaty
Organization Affairs," DoD Directive 5100.55, February 27, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5100_55.pdf

Continuity of military operations "under all circumstances across
the spectrum of threats" is prescribed in "Defense Continuity Plan
Development," DoD Instruction 3020.42, February 17, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/i3020_42.pdf

An updated Instruction entitled "Technical Surveillance
Countermeasures (TSCM) Program" was issued by Under Secretary of
Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone on February 22, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/i5240_05.pdf


JOUSTING OVER THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE

"I am increasingly concerned that the Senate Intelligence Committee
is unable to carry out its critically important oversight and
threat assessment responsibilities due to stifling partisanship
that is exhibited through repeated calls by Democrats on the
committee to conduct politically-motivated investigations," wrote
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in a March 3 letter to Minority
Leader Sen. Harry Reid.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/frist030306.pdf

"I agree with Senator Frist," Senator Reid replied, "the
Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has been
bogged down by partisanship."

"When faced with strong evidence that the Bush Administration has
misused intelligence..., time and again the Senate Intelligence
Committee has ducked its responsibilities and refused to hold the
Administration accountable. The recent record of the
Republican-controlled committee is most notable for its abdication
of authority and responsibility," Sen. Reid said.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/reid030306.html

The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to vote on March 7
on a proposal by Senator Rockefeller to conduct an investigation
of the NSA warrantless surveillance activity. An investigation is
favored by Democrats and some Republicans, but opposed by the
Republican leadership.



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 31
March 7, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** CIA SUED OVER PREPUBLICATION REVIEW
** CONGRESS ON AMENDING THE PATRIOT ACT, CAPTURED IRAQI DOCS
** ORIGINS OF "THE RIGHT TO KNOW"


CIA SUED OVER PREPUBLICATION REVIEW

A former Central Intelligence Agency employee, Thomas Waters Jr.,
filed a lawsuit against the Agency last week, arguing that publication
of his book had been improperly blocked in the prepublication review
process.

"The Central Intelligence Agency has unlawfully imposed a prior
restraint upon Thomas Waters by obstructing and infringing on his
right to publish his unclassified memoirs and threatening him with
civil and criminal penalties," according to the March 3 complaint
filed in DC District Court.

The case seems to reflect the tightening of controls on public
disclosure of information at the CIA.

Almost all of Waters' manuscript had been cleared for publication by
the CIA in September 2004, according to the complaint. But last
month, the Agency notified him that substantial portions of the book,
including some material that had previously been approved, could not
be published after all.

"The CIA continues to deliberately create a hostile environment for its
former employees who are seeking to do nothing other than publish
nonsensitive, unclassified information," said Mark S. Zaid, Waters'
attorney. "Its actions are completely unconstitutional and designed
to disable the First Amendment."

A news release about the case may be found here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/03/waters.html

The March 3 complaint in Waters v. CIA is posted here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/waters030306.pdf

See also "CIA Sued Over Right to Publish" by Shaun Waterman, United
Press International, March 6:

http://tinyurl.com/z86kk


CONGRESS ON AMENDING THE PATRIOT ACT, CAPTURED IRAQI DOCS

With final congressional reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act now
imminent, new legislation was introduced in the Senate yesterday to
amend the reauthorized Act.

"What this legislation does is reinstate provisions of the original
Senate-passed [Patriot Act reauthorization] bill," said Senator Arlen
Specter (R-PA). Those provisions were rejected by the House
Republican leadership.

The new bipartisan legislation, jointly sponsored by Senators Specter
and Leahy among others, would "require a more reasonable period for
delayed-notice search warrants, provide enhanced judicial review of
FISA orders and national security letters, require an enhanced factual
basis for a FISA order, and create national security letter sunset
provisions."

The legislation does not confront the awkward fact that the Bush
Administration appears to believe it does not have to comply with the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

See the introduction of the new bill here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/s2369.html

Another bill, introduced by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chair of the House
Intelligence Committee, would require the Director of National
Intelligence to release documents captured in Afghanistan or Iraq.

"The Director of National Intelligence shall make publicly available on
an Internet website all captured documents."

"The term 'captured document' means a document captured or collected in
Afghanistan or Iraq, including a document collected from the
Government of Iraq or from a private person and including a document
in electronic form, during Operation Desert Storm, Operation Enduring
Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom." See:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/hr4869.html


ORIGINS OF "THE RIGHT TO KNOW"

"There is nothing in the Constitution about 'the public's right to
know'," wrote former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence Mark
M. Lowenthal in his book "Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy" (CQ
Press, 2000, page 143).

"The Constitution safeguards freedom of speech and of the press, but
these are not the same as a right to information," Mr. Lowenthal
argued.

This is not quite correct. The Constitution may be readily understood
to grant a public right to know certain types of information.

Specifically, the Constitution imposes an obligation on the government
to publish two categories of information: a Journal of Congress
(Article I, section 5) and a statement and account of all receipts and
expenditures (Article I, section 9).

And the government's obligation to publish this information is
semantically identical (or nearly so) to a public right to know it.

The public only gained a broader legal right to access government
information with the Freedom of Information Act, which was first
enacted in 1966. Prior to that time, one could ask for information,
but the government had no duty to respond. Since then, thanks to the
FOIA, the public has had a legally enforceable right to compel
disclosure of non-exempted information.

As for the phrase "the right to know," it was apparently coined in the
1940s by Kent Cooper, who was the executive director of the Associated
Press. The New York Times credited him with originating the phrase in
an editorial on January 23, 1945. (As noted by James S. Pope in the
Foreword to "The People's Right to Know" by Harold L. Cross, Columbia
University Press, 1953, p. xi.)


_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email: saftergood@fas.org
voice: (202) 454-4691

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 32
March 10, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** MORE ON THE "INCOMPREHENSIBLE" ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917
** CIA ON THE PRESIDENT'S DAILY BRIEF
** ARMY INTELLIGENCE ON ARAB CULTURE
** THE JAMES MADISON AWARD AND SUNSHINE WEEK


MORE ON THE "INCOMPREHENSIBLE" ESPIONAGE ACT OF 1917

The Espionage Act is "in many respects incomprehensible," wrote Harold
Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. in a definitive law review article
three decades ago which explored the potential use of the Act to
prosecute leaks to the media.

The espionage statutes are "so sweeping as to be absurd," they argued
(previously noted in Secrecy News, 10/19/05).

"If these statutes mean what they seem to say and are constitutional,
public speech in this country since World War II has been rife with
criminality."

Now a scan of that 1973 paper is available online.

See "The Espionage Statutes and Publication of Defense Information,"
Columbia Law Review, May 1973, vol. 73, pp. 929-1087 (a large 6.3 MB
PDF file):

http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/edgar.pdf

Though it remains the best account of the legislative history of the
Espionage Act, the Edgar/Schmidt article is not the last or the
latest word on the meaning of the Act. In particular, the
prosecution of Samuel L. Morison in 1985 for providing classified
satellite photos to Jane's Defence Weekly established that the
Espionage Act could be used to successfully prosecute leakers.

An article in the current issue of Commentary Magazine now calls for
the prosecution of the New York Times for disclosing the NSA
warrantless surveillance activity.

Though many experts consider the NSA program to be illegal because it
violates the clear language of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, Commentary author Gabriel Schoenfeld argues that disclosure of
the program is the crime that should be investigated and prosecuted.

That perspective is examined in "Bill Keller in Chains: Commentary's
case for prosecuting the Times under the Espionage Act" by Jack
Shafer, Slate, March 9:

http://www.slate.com/id/2137792/


CIA ON THE PRESIDENT'S DAILY BRIEF

Some new details on the preparation of the President's Daily Brief
(PDB) and its presentation to the President and a small number of
other officials are discussed in a Central Intelligence Agency
declaration filed last week in the prosecution of former Vice
Presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

"Six mornings a week, intelligence briefers meet with the President
and selected senior Executive officials to provide a daily
intelligence briefing. Each briefer meets with one or more
designated officials to present an oral briefing and a binder
containing written materials for each official's review," wrote CIA
official Marilyn A. Dorn.

She argued in her declaration that responding to Mr. Libby's request
for production of various PDBs and related material would be
extremely burdensome and might also infringe on executive privilege.

See her March 2, 2006 declaration (filed March 3) here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/libby030306.pdf

A March 7 response from Mr. Libby is available here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/libby030706.pdf

The CIA has agreed to process a Freedom of Information Act request
from the Federation of American Scientists for redacted PDB materials
that it had declassified and provided to the Office of Special
Counsel.

But the Agency denied a request for fee waiver because, CIA official
Scott Koch wrote on March 3, "disclosing the information you seek is
not likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the
operations and activities of the United States Government."


ARMY INTELLIGENCE ON ARAB CULTURE

U.S. Army intelligence has produced a handbook that is intended "to
provide soldiers with a basic overview of Arab culture."

It begins with "Where is the Arab World?" and "What is an Arab?" and
proceeds onward to brief and elementary discussions of Arabic
language, culture, and politics.

Viewing the Arab world in this way, Army intelligence also puts itself
on display in the questions it poses and the answers it offers, but
it does so with some self-awareness and with nothing more offensive
than an occasional cliche.

"It is impossible to talk about groups of people without
generalizing," the document explains. "It then follows that it is
hard to talk about the culture of a group without generalizing. This
handbook attempts to be as accurate and specific as possible, but
inevitably contains such generalizations."

A copy of the new Handbook was obtained by Secrecy News.

See "Arab Cultural Awareness: 58 Factsheets," DCSINT Handbook No. 2,
Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, US Army Training and Doctrine
Command, January 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/arabculture.pdf


THE JAMES MADISON AWARD AND SUNSHINE WEEK

Secrecy News is grateful to be recognized by the American Library
Association (ALA) with its James Madison Award, which is "presented
annually on the anniversary of his birth (March 16) to honor those
who have championed, protected, and promoted public access to
government information and the public's right to know."

"This award is, we believe, a fitting recognition of your effective
voice for transparency and against unnecessary -- and often pointless
-- government secrecy," wrote ALA President Michael Gorman.

"Your publication, Secrecy News, contains invaluable information and
often serves as the first notice to the public of proposals to limit
access to information."

"The Project on Government Secrecy web site is a critical resource for
all those concerned with access and secrecy issues. It contains a
remarkable range of information on government secrecy policy and
often is the only place that much of the information can be
located," Mr. Gorman generously wrote.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/ala020706.pdf

Presentation of the award is one of several ALA activities scheduled
for Sunshine Week, which is next week, March 12-18. See this ALA
news release:

http://tinyurl.com/jyx5f

Details of other Sunshine Week programs and resources can be found on
the Sunshine Week web site here:

http://www.sunshineweek.org/



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 33
March 13, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** DNI NEGROPONTE ON INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION SHARING
** INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
** SOME NEW INTELLIGENCE-RELATED PUBLICATIONS
** US NEWS: SECRECY UNDER SCRUTINY


DNI NEGROPONTE ON INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION SHARING

In an effort to improve the sharing of intelligence information, the
Director of National Intelligence last year authorized the use of a
new marking for intelligence documents: RELIDO, or Releasable by
Information Disclosure Official.

RELIDO is intended "to facilitate information sharing through
streamlined, rapid release decisions by authorized disclosure
officials," DNI John D. Negroponte wrote in a June 2005 memo.

Essentially, the RELIDO marking permits authorized officials to release
documents (on a need-to-know basis, of course) without consulting the
originators of the documents.

This is a step forward since originator controls on the dissemination
of intelligence are one of the major bottlenecks that impede
intelligence information sharing.

A copy of the DNI memo, marked For Official Use Only (not RELIDO), was
obtained by Secrecy News.

See "Intelligence Community Implementation of Releasable by Information
Disclosure Official (RELIDO) Dissemination Marking," DCID 8 Series
Policy Memoranda 1, June 9, 2005:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid8-memo.html

No one should mistake the recent focus on intelligence information
sharing for greater openness or public disclosure. To the contrary,
"information sharing" has been accompanied by increased secrecy in
intelligence.

In 2004, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency decided that it
would no longer release unclassified intelligence directives under the
Freedom of Information Act. Though such directives had previously
been released, the CIA now claimed that they were exempt from FOIA as
internal agency records (exemption 2) and as intelligence sources and
methods information (exemption 3).

Consequently, Americans who are interested in such things are obliged
to seek out alternate sources of information.

Among the directives that CIA refused to release under the FOIA is
Director of Central Intelligence Directive 8/1, the last Directive
issued by former DCI George Tenet, on the subject of intelligence
information sharing.

That DCI directive was hailed enthusiastically but perhaps prematurely
by some officials.

It "changed the sharing paradigm from 'need to know' as determined by
the information collector to 'share at the first point of usability'
as determined by intelligence users across our community," wrote Maj.
Gen. John F. Kimmons, commander of the U.S. Army Intelligence and
Security Command, in INSCOM Journal last year.

A copy of the directive, marked For Official Use Only, was obtained by
Secrecy News.

See "Intelligence Community Policy on Intelligence Information
Sharing," DCID 8/1, June 4, 2004:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid8-1.html


INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Democratic proposals to initiate a congressional investigation of the
National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program have been
repeatedly rebuffed by Republican leaders in Congress.

This month, House Committees have produced no fewer than four adverse
reports on Democratic "resolutions of inquiry," which sought executive
branch records on domestic intelligence surveillance.

In the Senate, a proposal by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to investigate
the NSA program was voted down on party lines in the Senate
Intelligence Committee on March 7.

See the reports of the House Intelligence Committee, the House Armed
Services Committee, and the House Judiciary Committee (two) here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_rpt/index.html

Some background on the use of resolutions of inquiry as an instrument
of oversight can be found in "House Resolutions of Inquiry" by Louis
Fisher (who is now with the Law Library of Congress), Congressional
Research Service, May 12, 2003:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/RL31909.pdf

Sen. Russ Feingold announced yesterday that he would introduce a
resolution to censure President Bush for "authorizing the illegal
wiretapping program and then misleading the country about the
existence and legality of the program." See:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_cr/feingold031206.html


SOME NEW INTELLIGENCE-RELATED PUBLICATIONS

"Sources and Methods of Foreign Nationals Engaged in Economic and
Military Espionage" is the title of a September 15, 2005 hearing of a
House Judiciary Subcommittee which has just been published. See:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2005_hr/hhrg109-58.html

Defense Department policy on Operations Security has been updated in a
new directive. Operations Security (OPSEC) refers to the
identification and reduction of tell-tale signs of military operations
that could be exploited by an adversary.

See "DoD Operations Security (OPSEC) Program," DoD Directive 5205.02,
March 6, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5205_02.pdf

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone has
reissued the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual
(NISPOM), which "provides baseline standards for the protection of
classified information released or disclosed to industry."

See the updated NISPOM, DoD Manual 5220.22, February 28, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/nispom.htm


US NEWS: SECRECY UNDER SCRUTINY

The latest issue of U.S. News and World Report (March 20) features an
interview with me on the subject of government secrecy.

It is part of the observance of Sunshine Week, which is a nationwide
effort to focus public attention on the virtues of open government.

My not-so-smiling face can also be seen in light and shadow cast by
window blinds ("It's not cliche," the photographer explained, "it's
classic.").

See "Secrecy Under Scrutiny" by David E. Kaplan, U.S. News and World
Report, March 20:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060320/20qa.htm

A sidebar takes a look at Freedom of Information Act policy. See
"Finding out what Uncle Sam has on you" also by David E. Kaplan:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060310/10foia.htm

For more on Sunshine Week go to www.sunshineweek.org.



_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 34
March 15, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** A FOCUS ON "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED" INFORMATION
** MORE FROM CRS
** SOME MORE INTELLIGENCE-RELATED PUBLICATIONS
** IN THE PRESS


A FOCUS ON "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED" INFORMATION

The government's use of the problematic "sensitive but unclassified"
(SBU) designation to restrict access to information that does not
warrant classification is coming under new scrutiny.

"Federal agencies do not use uniform definitions of SBU information or
have consistent policies for safeguarding or releasing it," a new
study from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) observed.

"This lack of uniformity and consistency raises issues about how to
identify SBU information, especially scientific and technical
information; how to keep it from those who would use it malevolently,
while allowing access for those who need to use it; and how to
develop uniform nondisclosure policies and penalties."

The 82-page CRS report presents a comprehensive treatment of this
vexing subject. It surveys the origins of government SBU practices;
explores "contentious issues" involving SBU; and considers
recommendations to improve SBU policy.

CRS does not permit direct public access to its publications, but a
copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

See "'Sensitive But Unclassified' Information and Other Controls:
Policy and Options for Scientific and Technical Information," dated
February 15, 2006 (published March 14, 2006):

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/RL33303.pdf

The Government Accountability Office yesterday released a report on
SBU policies at the Departments of Energy and Defense to coincide
with a House Government Reform Subcommittee hearing. See "Managing
Sensitive Information: Departments of Energy and Defense Policies and
Oversight Could Be Improved," Report No. GAO-06-369, March 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/gao/sensitive.pdf

The National Security Archive conducted its own survey of SBU policies
at federal agencies and released a report entitled "Pseudo-Secrets:
A Freedom of Information Audit of the U.S. Government's Policies on
Sensitive Unclassified Information":

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB183/press.htm


MORE FROM CRS

Some other notable publications from the Congressional Research
Service include the following.

"Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses," updated March 10, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL32048.pdf

"Homeland Security: Protecting Airliners from Terrorist Missiles,"
updated February 16, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL31741.pdf

"Military Aviation: Issues and Options for Combating Terrorism and
Counterinsurgency," January 27, 2006:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL32737.pdf


SOME MORE INTELLIGENCE-RELATED PUBLICATIONS

"Intelligence in the Civil War" is the topic of a new study published
by the Central Intelligence Agency. See:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/civilw...s/Civil_War.htm

The technical challenges facing the National Geospatial-Intelligence
Agency (NGA) and a research agenda to help meet those challenges were
described in a new report from the National Research Council. See
"Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial
Intelligence Agency," 2006:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11601.html


IN THE PRESS

President Bush this week said that a newspaper -- the Los Angeles
Times -- had published details of a new technology used to defend
against improvised explosive devices, and that jihadists used details
from that newspaper story to develop techniques for defeating the new
technology. Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org argues that there is
reason to doubt the President's account. See "The Enemy is Me,"
March 14:

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002238.html

"In another sign of increasing government secrecy, the Federal
Aviation Administration has removed from its Web site the transcript
of a heated public hearing during which pilots ridiculed no-fly zones
that have surrounded Washington since 9/11," writes Lance Gay of
Scripps Howard News Service. See "FAA yanks potentially 'sensitive'
information from Web site," March 15:

http://tinyurl.com/zedcv

If the New York Times could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for
having disclosed the NSA warrantless surveillance activity, as some
enthusiasts have proposed, then who else might be guilty of a similar
offense? That question was posed by Jack Shafer in "A Gitmo for
Journos: Who besides the New York Times could be prosecuted under
the Espionage Act?", Slate, March 14:

http://www.slate.com/id/2138058/




_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web: www.fas.org/sgp/index.html

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 35
March 17, 2006

Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp


** CAPTURED IRAQI DOCUMENTS LOOK STRANGELY FAMILIAR
** BILL TO AUTHORIZE WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE INTRODUCED
** SOME NOTABLE DOCS ON OVERCLASSIFICATION, NAVY INTEL
** TRANSCRIPT OF FRANKLIN SENTENCING HEARING ONLINE


CAPTURED IRAQI DOCUMENTS LOOK STRANGELY FAMILIAR

The Director of National Intelligence yesterday announced the public
release of Iraqi documents that were captured by U.S. forces in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The release came in response to pressure from House Intelligence
Chairman Pete Hoekstra and Senator Rick Santorum, who had both
introduced legislation to compel disclosure of the captured Iraqi
documents, and from The Weekly Standard magazine and the Wall Street
Journal editorial board.

"The accessibility of these materials represents an important
departure from the past when previous document release efforts have
taken many years," the Office of the DNI said in a news release.

But the documents released by the DNI are a decidedly mixed bag.

Illustrating their eclectic nature, one of the captured Iraqi
documents is a print-out of an article from the Federation of
American Scientists web site.

"This file contains document relevant to the Mukhabarat or Iraqi
Intelligence Service (IIS), it explains the structure of the IIS,"
according to the DNI synopsis of the document (record number
CMPC-2003-006430).

In fact, the document was written in 1997 by John Pike (then at FAS,
now at GlobalSecurity.org), except for an added cover page which is
handwritten in Arabic.

The newly released documents may be found here:

http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm

The interesting possibility that raw intelligence materials like these
could be productively assessed by members of the public working
together online was optimistically considered by former intelligence
officer Michael Tanji.

"A successful collaborative analysis of Iraqi documents has
implications that go beyond just this problem set. Such an endeavor
will not go unnoticed by the reform-minded in the intelligence
community," he wrote.

See "An Army of Analysts," by Michael Tanji, The Weekly Standard, March
14:

http://www.weeklystandard.com

Writing in the blog GroupIntel, Mr. Tanji also had a provocative
response to the March 13 Secrecy News story on the new intelligence
community document marking "RELIDO."

See his "RELIDO: Why Bother?":

http://blog.groupintel.com/2006/03/15/relido-why-bother/


BILL TO AUTHORIZE WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE INTRODUCED