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Secrecy and Security News

Newer News: February 2000

January 2000

• Nuclear Secrets Mistakenly Declassified by Katy Saldarini, Government Executive, January 28. But "releasing the locations of nuclear weapons storage sites from 30 years ago is not going to damage national security."
• Declassification Let A Few Secrets Slip by Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, January 27. "Government agencies inadvertently declassified 14,890 pages of sensitive nuclear weapons information from the 1950s and 1960s that in at least one case were accessed by an outside researcher, according to a recent Department of Energy report to Congress."
• Echelon 'Proof' Discovered by Chris Oakes, Wired News, January 26. "References to a project Echelon have been found for the first time in declassified National Security Agency documents."
• Energy Secretary Releases Reports on Security and Counterintelligence Accomplishments, DOE press release, January 25. "Secretary Bill Richardson today released three reports that outline the Department of Energy's significant progress in improving security of the nation's nuclear secrets."
• Inside Information: Openness in Intelligence by Vernon Loeb, Washington Post, January 24. "Hulnick and Aftergood anchor opposite ends of the openness spectrum as debate on the issue grows in importance."
• Secret Nuke Documents Made Public by H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press, January 22. "While the documents were inadvertently opened to researchers, only one of the files was actually examined by any outsiders before the mistakes were discovered."
• U.S. Finds Nuclear Secrets in Open Archives, Reuters, January 19. "Hundreds of declassified documents at the National Archives, available for public perusal, contained nuclear weapons secrets that mistakenly had been left in, an Energy Department review said."
• The National Security Agency Declassified, a National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book by Jeffrey T. Richelson assisted by Michael L. Evans. A selection of declassified directives, memoranda and other documents on NSA organization and operations.
• CIA Recruiting Drive Paying Off by Tom Raum, Associated Press, January 17. "The CIA is 'pitching the romance of intelligence' through its ads and recruiting spiels, but such appeals are misleading..."
• Archivos Secretos en la Web (in Spanish) by Hector Pavon, Revista Internet Surf, December 1999. An Argentine magazine looks at on-line access to declassified government information in the U.S. and in Argentina.
• Pentagon Press Briefing: More on Y2K SpySat Glitch, briefing by ASD(PA) Ken Bacon, January 13. "I think everybody would understand that when you're dealing with intelligence collection systems of the most sensitive nature, the less said about them the better. We made an exception during the Y2K turnover..."
• DOE Memo on "Sensitive Information" from DOE General Counsel Mary Anne Sullivan, January 5. Recent legislation imposes severe penalties for disclosing "sensitive information"-- but doesn't define what that might be.
• Pentagon Briefing on Y2K, SpySat Glitch, briefing by Deputy Secretary John Hamre, January 4. "This is the first time we have ever made a report on one of these systems. And we only did it because in the full commitment we made to transparency for year 2000, we felt that we should do that."
• Y2K: In One of Few Failures, Link to Spy Satellite Fails, by Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, January 2. "Officials called the failure significant and said it was the most notable disruption attributed so far to the 2000 rollover."
• Pentagon Briefing on Y2K Rollover, press briefing by Deputy Secretary John Hamre, January 1. "We did have one significant problem, one that I had wished we hadn't had, but we did. One of our intelligence systems, a satellite-based intelligence system, experienced some Y2K failures last night shortly after the rollover of Greenwich Mean Time."

Older News: December 1999

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