02/04/12: WIRED reports that WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning is headed for a general court-martial, according to the commander of the US Army Military District of Washington in an announcement released late Friday. Major General Michael Linnington, the general convening authority for the district, made the determination that Manning will face all 22 charges leveled against him. The most serious charge — aiding the enemy — carries a possible death penalty. Prosecutors have said they will not seek the death penalty. Instead, Manning faces life in prison if convicted of all the charges.
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01/31/12: The Washington Times reports that former intelligence officials use “reprehensible” and “egregious” to describe the alleged acts of a former CIA officer charged by the government with betraying his own when he revealed the identities of two overseas operatives to the media. These former officials reject the image of John Kiriakou as a high-minded “whistleblower” who sought to expose official wrongdoing or a botched intelligence operation.
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01/27/12: The Blog of Legal Times reports that the US Justice Department has asked a federal judge to keep secret photos showing the death of Osama bin Laden, saying the images are classified because of their potential to incite violence against the United States. The department filed court papers this week in a FOIA suit in Washington asking US District Judge James Boasberg to keep the photos out of the public domain. The DOJ asserts the photos reveal specific military and intelligence activities, methods and techniques.
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01/10/12: The Miami Herald reports that a new lawsuit seeks to force the US government to make public the videotapes of harsh interrogation carried out on a Guantánamo Bay detainee nearly a decade ago. The federal lawsuit was filed Monday in New York. Lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights said they want the public to see the videotapes to shift the discussion about interrogation methods used in the quest to stop terrorism worldwide. The videotapes were made of the interrogation of Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani. He remains held at Guantánamo.
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12/16/11: The Local reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been granted permission to appeal against extradition from Britain to Sweden over rape allegations and a hearing will start on February 1, a court said Friday. The decision means Assange will spend a second Christmas at the country mansion of a wealthy supporter in Norfolk, eastern England. He was arrested last December on a European arrest warrant issued by Sweden after allegations by two women of sexual assault and rape. Assange believes the allegations are politically motivated and linked to WikiLeaks' release of hundreds of thousands of classified US files about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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11/23/11: The Washington Post reports that the Defense Intelligence Agency has reached a settlement with a former analyst who was fired but never told why. John Dullahan, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran and career Army officer, was stripped of his security clearance in 2009. Under a national security clause invoked by the Pentagon, he could not be provided with the information on the accusations that led to his termination, or attempt to contest the move under the normal appeals process.
Continue reading "Intel analyst stripped of clearance settles with DIA, but still doesn’t know why he was fired" »
11/15/11: Secrecy News reports that there is “little likelihood” that the Central Intelligence Agency will be able to produce any records documenting the CIA’s implementation of the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review that each classifying agency is required to conduct, the Agency said last week. The Fundamental Classification Guidance Review - ordered by President Obama in his December 2009 executive order 13526 (section 1.9) as a systematic effort to eliminate obsolete or unnecessary classification requirements - has already achieved some limited results at the Department of Defense and elsewhere.
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11/12/11: Politico reports that a federal lawsuit appears to have pried from the Obama administration the names of the members of a presidentially-appointed panel that handles reports of illegal and improper spying by the intelligence community. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it asked for records on the make-up of the Intelligence Oversight Board in February, after a reporter's query for the information was rejected. The online civil liberties group sued in September after getting no response to its request. EFF says it got an answer to its FOIA a week after filing suit.
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10/30/11: The Washington Times reports that the Army is preparing to hold a pre-trial hearing that for the first time will disclose the government’s case in detail against the soldier accused of disseminating thousands of classified documents that were aired on the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. A spokeswoman for the Military District of Washington at Fort McNair, which has jurisdiction over the proceedings, said the investigative hearing, known as an Article 32, will be held “in the Washington area.”
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10/20/11: Politico reports that the Justice Department is asking a federal appeals court to force a New York Times reporter to testify about his confidential sources at the trial of a Central Intelligence Agency officer accused of leaking top-secret information, a move that could unleash a major First Amendment battle. In a court filing Wednesday, federal prosecutors formally appealed US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema’s ruling in July that Times national security reporter James Risen did not have to identify his sources during the trial of ex-CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling.
Continue reading "Department of Justice still wants New York Times reporter’s sources" »
10/20/11: Secrecy News reports that a coalition of public interest groups recently asked the President to complete the process of nominating members to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, established by Congress to independently oversee the conduct of information sharing within government and to ensure the protection of privacy and civil liberties interests. The White House has also lagged in appointing five new members to the nine-member Public Interest Declassification Board, as the terms of its previous nominees have expired.
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10/13/11: Secrecy News reports that a court ruling that interpreted the term “national defense information” expansively to include unclassified, non-governmental information could open the door to a new series of anti-leak prosecutions under the Espionage Act, according to a petition that was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals this week. In US v. Dongfan Chung, a court ruled (and an appeals court last month upheld) that Chung would be sentenced under the guideline for “gathering national defense information” even though none of the information he handled was classified or even held by the government.
Continue reading "Ruling implies that Espionage Act could cover unclassified information" »
08/26/11: Secrecy News reports that The Department of Justice refused this month to declassify a 2001 legal Office of Legal Counsel opinion by John C. Yoo concerning the legality of the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program. The redacted information in the OLC opinion “is classified, covered by non-disclosure provisions contained in other federal statutes, and is protected by the deliberative process privilege,” wrote Paul P. Colborn, Special Counsel at OLC.
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08/03/11: The Miami Herald reports that on the 50th anniversary of the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency has released more of it long-held secret papers on its failed 1961 Cuba operation to overthrow Fidel Castro. The secret documents were released in Washington, DC, pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Peter Kornbluh, an activist who has long sough to unmask US secret operations in Latin America.
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06/07/11: SpyTalk reports that The ex-CIA operations officer known as Ishmael Jones, who penned an acid attack on his former employer in an unauthorized, 2008 memoir, is trying to raise cash to defend himself in a suit brought by the spy agency. The CIA is suing Jones (a pseudonym taken by the former Marine and clandestine operations officer) on the basis that his memoir, "The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture," was published without the agency’s permission, this violating his secrecy oath.
Continue reading "Ex-CIA author, pursued by agency, appeals for help with legal defense " »
Opinion: America’s unnecessary secrets
11/08/11: The New York Times features an opinion piece by Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, and J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2007. Goitein and Leonard discuss how the danger of excessive government secrecy is a lesson we should have learned over the last decade. They assert that proper classification of information is vital to keeping the nation safe, but that “overclassification,” as the 9/11 Commission found, jeopardizes national security by inhibiting information sharing.
November 08, 2011 at 07:54 AM in Secrecy / Transparency / FOIA, Commentary / Opinion | Permalink