SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2008, Issue No. 30
March 27, 2008

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

MARINE CORPS WILL RESTORE ONLINE ACCESS TO PUBLIC DOCUMENTS

The U.S. Marine Corps has agreed to restore public access to unclassified doctrinal documents on its web site.

The official Marine Corps doctrine web site remains inaccessible. But in response to a Federation of American Scientists request under the Freedom of Information Act, the Marine Corps said that all releasable contents would soon be made publicly available through the Publications directory of the main USMC web site (www.usmc.mil).

"Publications are actively being loaded with the goal of having all distribution A publications (approved for public release) loaded onto this site as soon as possible," wrote Captain E.C. Snyder on March 19.

The move follows a similar action by the Army's Reimer Digital Library last month. The Army had barred public access to its unclassified holdings, but then relented in response to a Freedom of Information Act action by the Federation of American Scientists (Secrecy News, Feb. 25).

A selection of U.S. Marine Corps documents on intelligence and security doctrine may be found on the FAS web site here:

NEW DNI DIRECTIVE ON TECHNICAL SURVEILLANCE COUNTERMEASURES

Last month the Director of National Intelligence issued a new Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) on "Technical Surveillance Countermeasures" (TSCM).

TSCM "represents the convergence of two distinct disciplines -- counterintelligence and security countermeasures," the directive explained. Its purpose is "to detect and nullify a wide variety of technologies used to gain unauthorized access to classified national security information, restricted data, or otherwise sensitive information."

The directive was released (in a fuzzy, not very well scanned copy) by the ODNI Freedom of Information Act office.

See "Technical Surveillance Countermeasures," ICD 702, February 18, 2008:

DIA WITHDRAWS, CORRECTS OFFICIAL HISTORY

To its credit, the Defense Intelligence Agency promptly withdrew an official DIA history that mistakenly described the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in the 1980s as an attack on Iran (Secrecy News, March 26). As soon as the error became public, DIA replaced the entire document with an updated account.

In an email message yesterday to Israeli author Gideon Remez, who discovered the error, DIA webmaster David Baird wrote: "You are correct that the historical fact is wrong. We did not realize it until you pointed it out. We are taking steps to correct it."

By yesterday afternoon, the 1996 "Defense Intelligence Agency: A Brief History," which contained the error, had been replaced on the DIA web site by a 2007 "History of the Defense Intelligence Agency." Both documents can be found on the FAS web site here:

NATO ENLARGEMENT, AND MORE FROM CRS

Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

"Enlargement Issues at NATO's Bucharest Summit," March 12, 2008:

"The NATO Summit at Bucharest, 2008," March 24, 2008:

"Selected Federal Homeland Security Assistance Programs: A Summary," updated January 31, 2008:

"Selected Laws Governing the Disclosure of Customer Phone Records by Telecommunications Carriers," March 10, 2008:

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

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