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Government Secrecy e-Prints

This archive includes timely and provocative materials on topics of current interest. Any opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this archive are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federation of American Scientists.

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• Secrecy and Leaks: An Exchange with Daniel Ellsberg, January 2013
• Freedom of Expression during COVID-19, Law Library of Congress, September 2020
• Enhancing the Security and Integrity of America's Research Enterprise, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, July 2020
• NORTHCOM Operational Plans, Pandemic and Endemic by William M. Arkin, April 16, 2020 (PDF)
• Balancing Congressional Needs for Classified Information: A Case Study of the Strategic Defense Initiative by Carter W. Page, US Naval Academy, May 17, 1993
• Weaving the Tangled Web: Military Deception in Large-Scale Combat Operations, edited by Christopher M. Rein, Army University Press, 2018
• The Costs of War: Obstacles to Public Understanding by Steven Aftergood, November 14, 2018
• Secrecy in U.S. National Security: Why a Paradigm Shift Is Needed by James Bruce, Sina Beaghley, W. George Jameson, The RAND Corporation, November 2018
• Classified Activities, Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards (SFFAS) 56, Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board, October 2018
• Norris Bradbury and Edward Teller: A Fission-Fusion Reaction by R. A. Meade, LA-UR-18-21047, February 12, 2018
• National Security Classification: Changing an Outdated System by Harry Cooper, July 2017
• Controlled Unclassified Information: Government Bureaucracy Out of Control by Harry Cooper, July 2017
• Parliamentary Oversight of the Executive Branch, Law Library of Congress, August 2017
• Features of Parliamentary Websites in Selected Jurisdictions, Law Library of Congress, July 2017
• Bethe, Oppenheimer, Teller and the Fermi Award: Norris Bradbury Speaks, Roger A. Meade, LA-UR-17-23522, April 28, 2017
• Notes on Los Alamos (1953), Roger A. Meade, LA-UR-17-22764, April 5, 2017
• If You Have A Family Member in China, Chances of Getting a Security Clearance Are Remote by Sheldon I. Cohen, Fall 2016
• Miranda Warning Equivalents Abroad, Law Library of Congress, May 2016
• Protection of Trade Secrets, in Brazil, China, India, Russian Federation, South Africa, Law Library of Congress, August 2013
• Office of Special Counsel Annual Report to Congress for FY2014, August 2015
• On the Outside Looking In, remarks of Steven Aftergood at the 8th Annual Intelligence Community Legal Conference, May 7, 2014
• Memorandum About the Security Clearance Process by Elaine Mittleman Esq., July 27, 2015
• Setting Priorities: An Essential Step in Transforming Declassification, Public Interest Declassification Board, December 2014
• Revolution in Nuclear Detection Affairs by Warren Stern, November 2013
• Pulling History from the Waste Stream: Identification and Collection of Manhattan Project and Cold War Era Artifacts on the Hanford Site - 14085, November 2013
• Remarks of ODNI General Counsel Robert S. Litt on Transparency and Intelligence, American University Washington College of Law, Collaboration on Government Secrecy, March 18, 2014
• An Inquiry into the Dynamics of Government Secrecy by Steven Aftergood, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol. 48, No. 2, Summer 2013
• Predictive Science Panel Unclassified Report, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, August 20-22, 2013
• Keeping Government Secrets: A Pocket Guide on the State-Secrets Privilege, the Classified Information Procedures Act, and Classified Information Security Officers, Federal Judicial Center, Second Edition, 2013
• Administration Strategy on Mitigating the Theft of U.S. Trade Secrets, The White House, February 2013
• National Strategy for Information Sharing and Safeguarding, The White House, December 2012
• United States Government Policy for Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern, National Institutes of Health, March 29, 2012
• Who Watches the Watchmen? The Conflict Between National Security and Freedom of the Press by Gary Ross, National Intelligence University, July 2011
• Building Budgetary Transparency and Accountability for the US Nuclear Weapons Program by Stephen I. Schwartz, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, September 8, 2011
• Abuse of state secrecy and national security: obstacles to parliamentary and judicial scrutiny of human rights violations by Dick Marty, for the Parliamentary Assembly, Council of Europe, September 7, 2011
• Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking by Philip L. Campbell, Sandia National Laboratories, August 2011
• What Should Be Classified? Some Guiding Principles by Steven Aftergood, prepared for the Open Society Justice Initiative, May 2011
• Military Demonstration and Disclosure of New Weapons by Bernard Brodie, World Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3, April 1953
• Protecting Sensitive Information: The Virtue of Self-Restraint by Dallas Boyd, Homeland Security Affairs, Volume 7, May 2011
• Review of USAID/Afghanistan's Bank Supervision Assistance Activities and the Kabul Bank Crisis, US AID Office of Inspector General report, March 16, 2011
• National Security Secrecy: How the Limits Change by Steven Aftergood, Social Research, vol. 77, no. 3, Fall 2010
• Toward a Taxonomy of Secrets, Cryptologic Quarterly, Spring/Summer 2001, Vol. 20, nos. 1-2
• Senator Brien McMahon on Declassification of the Size of the U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, January 31, 1949
• NSTB Assessments Summary Report: Common Industrial Control System Cyber Security Weaknesses, National SCADA Test Bed, Idaho National Laboratory, May 2010
• The Greatest Mathematical Discovery? by David H. Bailey and Jonathan M. Borwein, May 12, 2010
• Statement of Steven Aftergood (FAS) on Formerly Restricted Data before the Public Interest Declassification Board, July 22, 2010
• Statement of Andrew Weston-Dawkes (Department of Energy) on Formerly Restricted Data before the Public Interest Declassification Board, July 22, 2010
• Prohibited Personnel Practices - A Study Retrospective, Report to the President and the Congress from the Merit Systems Protection Board, June 2010
• How the Posse Comitatus Act Restricts Department of Defense Information Sharing (master's thesis) by Daniel J. Sennott, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, June 2010
• Media and Military Relations During the Mexican War (master's thesis) by Matthew N. Metzel, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, June 2010
• Reflections on the Eroding Authority of Government Institutions, memorandum for President Nixon from Daniel P. Moynihan, November 13, 1970
• Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, Report of the DoD Independent Review, January 2010
• Radiological Survey of Downtown Washington DC for the 2009 Presidential Inauguration, National Nuclear Security Administration, March 2009
• Judicial Interpretations of Egan by Louis Fisher, The Law Library of Congress, November 13, 2009
• Opening Child Welfare Proceedings in the Family Court of the District of Columbia, testimony of Matthew I. Fraidin at a D.C. Council meeting, November 4, 2009
• The Military Censorship of Pictures: Photographs that came under the ban during the world war [WWI] -- and why by Lt. Col. Kendall Banning, U.S. Army Signal Reserve Corps, 1926
• Stellar Evolution, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Nucleogenesis by A.G.W. Cameron, Chalk River Laboratory report CRL-41, June 1957
• Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works by Steven Aftergood, Yale Law and Policy Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (399), Spring 2009
• Congressional Access to National Security Information: Precedents from the Washington Administration by Louis Fisher, Law Library of Congress, May 22, 2009
• Executive Branch Classified National Security Information and Congress, prepared by the staff of the Information Security Oversight Office for the Public Interest Declassification Board, June 2007
• Dysfunctional Information Restrictions by M.E. Bowman, Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies, Fall/Winter 2006-2007, posted with permission from the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (www.afio.com).
• President's Game? by Louis Fisher, Legal Times, December 4, 2006. "History refutes claims of unlimited presidential power over foreign affairs."
• The "Sole Organ" Doctrine by Louis Fisher, Law Library of Congress, Studies on Presidential Power in Foreign Relations, Study No. 1, August 2006.
• Historians View Newly Released CIA Records, June 6, 2006
  • New Information on Cold War CIA Stay-Behind Operations in Germany and on the Adolf Eichmann Case by Timothy Naftali, University of Virginia
  • Gustav Hilger: From Hitler's Foreign Office to CIA Consultant by Robert Wolfe, former archivist at the U.S. National Archives.
  • Tscherim Soobzokov by Richard Breitman, American University.
  • CIA Files Relating to Heinz Felfe, SS Officer and KGB Spy by Norman J.W. Goda, Ohio University
• Lee Hamilton: Remarks on Classification from a symposium sponsored by the Information Security Oversight Office, October 18, 2005. "At a time when the U.S. intelligence community is under intense scrutiny in the aftermath of 9/11 and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we only increase public skepticism about our government by denying the public information."
• Nuclear Space Secrecy -- An Outdated Policy (editorial), Nucleonics, March 1964. "The argument that declassification of our nuclear space programs involves a risk of any consequence to the national security becomes increasingly difficult to support."
• "Got Toxic Milk?" Reconsidered by Milton Leitenberg and George Smith, June 2005. "On May 30, the New York Times published a guest editorial that described a potential attack on the nation's milk supply by a terrorist armed with a gallon jug containing a few grams of botulinum toxin."
• Teleportation Physics Study by Eric W. Davis, Air Force Research Laboratory, August 2004. "This study was tasked with the purpose of collecting information describing the teleportation of material objects, providing a description of teleportation as it occurs in physics, its theoretical and experimental status, and a projection of potential applications." (1.7 MB PDF file)
• Smith Amendment Update by Sheldon I. Cohen, October 2004, reports that Congress has now modified the law that categorically denied security clearances to those convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison for more than one year.
• Theft and Misuse of Government Information by David Berry, Journal of Public Inquiry, Fall-Winter 2003.
• Howard Morland on The Progressive Case from a symposium at Cardozo Law School, March 2004.
• Smith Amendment Update by Sheldon I. Cohen, May 2004, takes another look at the law that categorically denies security clearances to those convicted of a crime and who have been sentenced to prison for more than one year.
• A Rejoinder on Polygraph by John F. Sullivan, March 22, 2004. "I am not a rabid proponent of polygraph and know, better than most, its limitations, but there is another side to the polygraph story which, in all fairness, deserves a hearing."
• The Polygraph Vs. National Security by Alan P. Zelicoff, March 11, 2004. "Why did Lab management react so strongly to my polygraph protest? There is only one credible explanation: If DOE dumps polygraphs, the other US government agencies that have long used them - CIA, NSA, and the FBI - look pretty silly by comparison (and indeed they are if they place the slightest reliance on the polygraph)."
• Safeguarding National Security Through Public Release of Environmental Information: Moving the Debate to the Next Level by Joseph D. Jacobson, George Washington University School of Law, Master's Thesis, August 31, 2002
• Smith Amendment Alert! by Sheldon I. Cohen, December 2003, criticizing a new law that categorically denies security clearances to those convicted of a crime and who have been sentenced to prison for more than one year.
• History and Los Alamos -- Will There Ever Be a Satisfactory Relationship?, by Los Alamos archivist Roger Meade, presented at the AAAS annual meeting, February 15, 2003.
• The 1979 Bethe-Kidder Correspondence on The Progressive Case, introduced by Howard Morland. "The existence of this correspondence was unknown to the outside world until Kidder revealed it to me in the spring of 1999."
• Bob Kerrey: Keynote Address to the NIMA Historical Imagery Declassification Conference, September 20, 2002. "The greatest barrier to good domestic and foreign policies is the ignorance of the citizens whose opinions often dictate what our elected representatives are willing to do."
• On Leaks of National Security Secrets: A Response to Michael Hurt by Steven Aftergood, National Security Studies Quarterly, Winter 2002
• Understanding Controls on Unclassified Government Information, by James J. Bagley, NCMS Viewpoints, National Classification Management Society, Vol. 1, 1993.
• In the Public Interest, Report of the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Access to and Disclosure of Scientific Information, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2002.
• The End of Secrecy? Military Competitiveness in the Age of Transparency, by Lt. Col. Beth Kaspar, USAF, Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, August 2001.
• Amy Smithson Responds to Secrecy News, November 16, 2001. On the proper limits to public access to environmental and accident consequence information.
• James Bamford Responds to Charges Made in Secrecy News concerning the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, July 25, 2001. "The time for secrecy has long passed on the USS Liberty incident, in both Israel and the United States. Based on the above evidence, there is certainly more than enough probable cause to conduct a serious investigation into what really happened - and why."
• Avner Cohen on Israeli Nuclear Secrecy, letter to Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein, July 2000. "The conflict is about defining the boundaries of discussion and the freedom of academic research on the subject of Israeli nuclear policy, in such a way that it does not endanger national security, on the one hand, or the open-democratic character of the State, on the other hand."
• The Holocaust Bomb: A Question of Time, by Howard Morland, January 25, 2001. The author of the 1979 Progressive magazine article on "The H-Bomb Secret" reflects on secrecy and nuclear weapons twenty years later (updated February 2003).
• Last of Energy Department's Openness Team Leaves, a tribute to Roger K. Heusser, January 2001.
• Openness and the CIA by Warren F. Kimball, Studies in Intelligence, Vol 44, No. 2 (2000). "Secrecy should not be a habit, but a matter of principle, practicality, and plain old common sense."
• Government Secrecy and Knowledge Production: A Survey of Some General Issues by Steven Aftergood, Cornell University Peace Studies Program Occasional Paper #23, October 1999
• CIA's Pre-Publication Review Process, as described in a paper by John Hollister Hedley, Chairman of the CIA Publications Review Board, Spring 1998. A 1981 CIA Inspector General account of the Publication Review Board is here.
• Cold War Documentation at the CIA, a paper presented by Ed Cohen, CIA Director of Information Management, at a National Archives conference, 25 September 1998
• Ley de Acceso a la Información, a freedom of information law for the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, adopted in November 1998 (in Spanish)
• National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information in Chile, by Cecilia Medina and Felipe González
• Las Dimensiones Secretas Del Gasto Publico: Exceso y Arbitrariedad, ("The Secret Dimensions of Public Expenditures"), an analysis of secret spending in Argentina, July 1997 (in Spanish)
• Openness: The Next Steps, Remarks of Dr. Roger Anders, Department of Energy, June 25, 1997
• DOE Fusion Managers and Science: A Personal Reaction by Marvin M. Mueller, June 14, 1997
• My Years with the CIA, a fierce critique of CIA declassification policy by historian George C. Herring
• Secrecy and International Relations by David N. Gibbs examines how secrecy affects the conduct and study of international relations
• Do You Wanna Know a Secret? One Court Case Lifts the Veil On the High Cost of Classification by Scott Armstrong, February 16, 1997
• Declassification: Where Are We Today?, an opinion piece by Jim David of the National Air and Space Museum (February 1997)
• Secret government spending in Argentina is examined in Los Gastos Reservados en el Gobierno Nacional, the first study of its kind (in Spanish).
• Secrecy and Accountability in U.S.Intelligence by Steven Aftergood, October 1996
• The Declassification Backlog of Historic Records: A Problem For Both the Department of Defense and All Those Who Seek a Better Understanding of the Cold War prepared for the Defense Department Legacy Resource Management Program by Page Putnam Miller, December 1994.
• Letter from Theodore Draper, March 22, 1993
• Letter from Carl Sagan, February 19, 1993

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Updated July 16, 2023