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Monday, April 13, 2015

FAS Newsletter 4/13


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From the Blogs


Intelligence Oversight in the 113th Congress: A new report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence describes oversight activities in the 113th Congress from January 2013 to January 2015. Highlights of the report include: over-control of classified information continues to hamper information sharing- even in the intelligence community, efforts to enlist the resources of the Government Accountability Office to strengthen intel oversight are continuing and details on the three-volume, still-classified CIA torture report.

Justice Dept Updates its FOIA Regulations: The Department of Justice last week published newly updated regulations on implementation of the Freedom of Information Act, with several notable changes made in response to public comments. Fifteen sets of comments were submitted by individual members of the public or public interest organizations after the Department released its draft FOIA regulations in 2011. In a lengthy Federal Register notice on April 3, DOJ addressed all of the comments, and actually adopted a number of the changes recommended by public commenters.

Two New Judges Appointed to FISA Court: Chief Justice John Roberts designated two new judges to the eleven-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Court announced last week.  Judge James P. Jones of the Western District of Virginia and Judge Thomas B. Russell of the Western District of Kentucky will serve on the court beginning May 19, 2015. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rules on applications for electronic surveillance and physical search (“and other investigative actions”) under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In recent years, the Court has also secretly interpreted intelligence surveillance law in ways that were unexpected and counterintuitive, authorizing the collection of all domestic telephone metadata records.

Cultural Understanding in U.S. Army Doctrine: A new U.S. Army doctrine examines cultural understanding in warfare. The new Army doctrine on cultural understanding emerges from and builds upon existing Army counterinsurgency doctrine. It is “outward looking” and does not pause to contemplate the cultural foundations of the Army itself.

National Archives Tackles Email Management: Overwhelmed by the challenge of trying to sort, identify and preserve historically valuable government email, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has devised what it calls the Capstone approach to email management. Under Capstone, government email would be categorized for retention or disposal based on the title or position of the email sender, rather than the contents of the email message. Those officials responsible for agency policy and mission performance would have their emails systematically collected and saved; others would not. In theory, this approach should simplify the task of email management and improve the preservation of historically valuable email.

FRUS on Investigating Intelligence in the 1970s: A new collection of executive branch documents on the investigations of U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1970s was assembled for the State Department's Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series. The new collection was just published in hardcopy.

DHS Seeks Increase in Domestic HUMINT Collection: The Department of Homeland Security aims to increase its domestic human intelligence collection activity this year, the Department told Congress in a hearing in September 2014. Human intelligence collection in this context does not necessarily mean that the Department is running spies under cover. According to a 2009 report from the Congressional Research Service (footnote 38), “For purposes of DHS intelligence collection, HUMINT is used to refer to overt collection of information and intelligence from human sources. DHS does not, generally, engage in covert or clandestine HUMINT.”

Railroad-Related Facilities and More from CRS: Secrecy News has obtained recently released CRS reports on topics such as ballistic missile defense in the Asia-Pacific region, the no-fly list and net neutrality.
 

Postdoctoral Opportunity: Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge


The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge is currently recruiting four postdoctoral researchers to work on projects related to extreme risks arising from technical advances. Projects include: Specific projects include: responsible innovation in transformative technologies; horizon-scanning and foresight; ethics and evaluation of extreme technological risks, and policy and governance challenges associated with emerging technologies.

The deadline to apply is April 24, 2015. Additional details and application details can be found here. 
 

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