SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2021, Issue No. 14
October 4, 2021

A PUSH TO ELEVATE OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE

Open source intelligence -- which is derived from open, unclassified sources -- should be recognized as a mature intelligence discipline that is no less important than other established forms of intelligence, the House of Representatives said last month in the FY 2022 defense authorization act (sec. 1612).

The House directed the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence to develop and implement "a plan to elevate open-source intelligence to a foundational intelligence for strategic intelligence that is treated on par with information collected from classified means (for example, human intelligence, signals intelligence, and geospatial intelligence)."

Considering that those classified disciplines have large dedicated agencies of their own (CIA, NSA, NGA), it would seem to be a major undertaking to "elevate" open source intelligence to the same level and to treat it comparably.

Significantly, the House directive is driven not by some abstract preference for open sources but by "the intelligence priorities of the commanders of the combatant commands." The thinking appears to be that open source intelligence -- that can be shared widely or even (sometimes) publicly disclosed -- offers practical advantages to military commanders that other, highly classified forms of intelligence typically lack.

A related sign of dissatisfaction with unchecked military secrecy can be found in another provision of the House authorization bill that would require the Space Force to "conduct a review of each classified program . . . to determine whether the level of classification of the program could be changed to a lower level or the program could be declassified."

In recent years, open source intelligence has been managed by the elusive Open Source Executive (OSE) which is administratively housed at the Central Intelligence Agency. To the bewilderment and frustration of many users, the OSE decommissioned its own website in 2019 and made its products exceptionally difficult to access.

In response, last year's intelligence authorization act (sect. 326) required a plan "for improving usability of the OSE" as well as other steps to enhance the utility of open source collection for intelligence. But so far, there is no externally visible sign of any change for the better.

Earlier this year, the CIA denied a Freedom of Information Act request for an unclassified OSE publication on North Korean ballistic missile tests. The CIA did not dispute that the document is unclassified, but it said the report was exempt from disclosure anyway. An appeal of the denial is pending.

The US military's interest in open source intelligence is longstanding and arguably dates back to colonial times. The Army's Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin devoted an issue to the subject in 2005.

A 2006 Army Field Manual (since superseded) presented interim doctrine on the collection of open source intelligence.

ENERGY DEPT ISSUES MORE DECLASSIFICATION DECISIONS

The formerly classified fact that one metric ton of plutonium metal was to be moved from the Savannah River Site in 2019 for use in nuclear weapon pit production at Los Alamos was declassified in 2018. This recently disclosed declassification decision was one of a handful of such actions that are taken each year by the Department of Energy.

DOE is required to perform "continuous review" of information that is classified under the Atomic Energy Act (sec. 2162) and to periodically determine which information can be removed from the category of Restricted Data and declassified. And so it does, every now and then.

Some of the resulting declassification decisions pertain to specific events, like the transfer of nuclear material from one site to another. Others are narrowly technical, like the declassification of "the static and dynamic equations of state for 71 < Z < 90 for pressures > 10 Mbar." (Z is the atomic number, where 71 is Lutetium and 90 is Thorium.)

In one anomalous case, the scope of the declassification action itself was redacted and remains undisclosed. This is somewhat hard to understand but DOE apparently holds that, having been declassified, the entire subject of this action now falls within the category of "unclassified controlled nuclear information" which is exempt from disclosure.

Declassification decisions under the Atomic Energy Act through last year were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

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The Federation of American Scientists last week renewed its petition to the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense to declassify the current number of weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile and the number that have been dismantled.

"US nuclear weapons policy should be conducted on the basis of accurate public information to the extent possible," the FAS petition said. "Declassification of stockpile data supports a factual deliberative process in Congress and elsewhere."

"We will begin the process of evaluating your proposal and conducting the necessary coordination," replied Nick Prospero, the acting director of the Office of Classification at the Department of Energy.

The size of the US nuclear stockpile was previously declassified and disclosed by the government for each year through FY 2017, when the Trump Administration ended the practice. (Stockpile numbers through FY 2020 were declassified by the Biden Administration in 2021.)

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Another FAS petition, filed in 2018, to declassify the size of the current US inventory of highly enriched uranium has lately received a favorable response from the Department of Energy.

"The program office has indicated they are ready to support the declassification request," said Andrew Weston-Dawkes, then-director of the DOE Office of Classification, on September 8. "I suspect there is a good amount of work to collect and process the HEU data so hopefully we can provide an update on status in a couple of months."

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

Secrecy News is archived at:
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