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From the Blogs
Using Classification to Curb Secrecy: When
government employees believe that classified information in their
possession is improperly classified, they “are encouraged and expected”
to challenge its classification status, according to President
Obama’s executive order 13526 (section 1.8). And sometimes they do. In
FY 2012, there were 402 classification challenges filed by government
employees. Such classification challenges have the potential to serve as
a powerful internal check on over-classification. But that potential is
not yet being fully realized, either because the procedure is unknown to
employees or because its use is implicitly discouraged.
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Number Declassified: Only 309 Warheads Cut by Obama Administration:
After a transparency hiatus of four years, the Obama administration has
declassified the size of its nuclear weapons stockpile: 4,804 warheads
as of September 2013. The size is 309 warheads fewer than the 5,113
warheads that the administration reported in 2010 were in the stockpile
as of September 2009. What the declassification does not include is a
number for how many retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement.
FISA Annual Report Recedes in Importance: For
many years, the Justice Department’s annual report to Congress on the
use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a primary source of
public information on intelligence surveillance activity and on the
workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Today, that is
less true than ever before. The latest report which was released last
week shows that in 2013, the Government submitted 1,655 applications for
electronic surveillance, physical search or both. Of the 1,588
applications that
included electronic surveillance, none were denied by the Court. But
that hardly provides an accurate sense of the scope or the scale of
intelligence surveillance activity.
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program and More from CRS:
Secrecy News has obtained recently released CRS reports on topics such
as arms control and nonproliferation agreements, changes in the Arctic, the effect of sanctions on Iran and the Target data breach.
ODNI Seeks to Obscure CIA Role in Human Intelligence: The
Office of the Director of National Intelligence is attempting to
conceal unclassified information about the structure and function of
U.S. intelligence agencies, including the leading role of the Central
Intelligence Agency in collecting human intelligence. Last month, ODNI
issued a heavily redacted version of its Intelligence Community
Directive 304 on “Human Intelligence.” The new redactions come as a
surprise because most of the censored text had already been published by
ODNI itself in an earlier iteration of the same unclassified Directive
from 2008.
Selective Prosecution and the Espionage Act: Government
officials disclose classified information to the press with some
frequency, but only rarely are they prosecuted for it. Such selective
prosecution renders the law unfair, said attorney Abbe Lowell at the April 2
sentencing hearing of his client, Stephen Kim, who pled guilty to an
unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Mr. Kim, a former
State Department Korea specialist who could have been sentenced to 10
years in prison and a fine of $250,000, received a 13 month jail
sentence.
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