Wiki-Whinging About Increasing Security Measures

The Wiki-Wallop that was delivered to the USG's classified information holdings in 2010 has, predictably, resulted in a backlash that will tighten up our info security measures. And that, ironically, does damage to responsible advocates of declassification and disclosure such as the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.

FAS finds itself Wiki-Whipsawed. It denounced WikiLeaks, and paid the price for that in loss of esteem from the more extreme openness advocates. And yet, its own project will now suffer as the USG responds to WikiLeaks by retreating further into its shell of secrecy.

FAS did some justified Wiki-Whining yesterday in a post about Tightening Security in the “Post-WikiLeaks” Era. They make a good point:

The Wikileaks model for receiving and publishing classified documents exploits gaps in information security and takes advantage of weaknesses in security discipline. It therefore produces greater disclosure in open societies, where security is often lax and penalties for violations are relatively mild, than in closed societies. Within the U.S., the Wikileaks approach yields greater disclosure from those agencies where security is comparatively poor, such as the Army, than from agencies with more rigorous security practices, such as the CIA.

What this means is that Wikileaks is exercising a kind of evolutionary pressure on government agencies, and on the government as a whole, to ratchet up security in order to prevent wholesale compromises of classified information. If the Army becomes more like the CIA in its information security policies, or so the thinking goes, and if the U.S. becomes more like some foreign countries, then it should become less vulnerable to selective security breaches.

Regarding that ratcheting-up of security, FAS linked to a January 3, 2011, memo from the Office of Management and Budget titled “Initial Assessments of Safeguarding and Counterintelligence Postures for Classified National Security Information in Automated Systems” [here]. The memo includes an 11-page list of questions and prompts for USG agencies to use in their security self-assessments.

I was relieved to see that blogging and social networking were not mentioned in the assessment criteria. However, there was this:

Have you conducted a trend analysis of indicators and activities of the employee population which may indicate risky habits or cultural and societal differences other than those expected for candidates (to include current employees) for security clearances?

Undefined "risky habits" could be a broad enough category to justify monitoring of government employee blogging, perhaps. We'll see.

There was also this:

Do you use psychiatrist and sociologist to measure:

o Relative happiness as a means to gauge trustworthiness?
o Despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness?

So, will we see shrinks assessing employee trustworthiness according to some approved ratio of happiness-to-grumpiness? And how do you measure that, anyway? Is there a happiness dipstick?

FRUS Volumes Not Coming Fast Enough To Suit Everybody

Secrecy News, the blog of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Project on Government Secrecy, noted today's release of the latest Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volume and took the occasion to voice its displeasure with the pace of publication of the FRUS series.

See: State Dept Series Falls Farther Behind Schedule

The U.S. State Department’s official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series had another disappointing year in 2009 with only two softcopy volumes published to date, including one released last week on “Global Issues, 1973-1976.”

The FRUS series is supposed to provide “comprehensive documentation of the major foreign policy decisions and actions of the United States Government” and it must must be “thorough, accurate, and reliable.” As such, it is a potentially vital tool for advancing declassification of significant historical records and assuring government accountability, at least over the long run.
Publication of FRUS is not optional. By statute, “The Secretary of State shall ensure that the FRUS series shall be published not more than 30 years after the events recorded.” But that 30 year goal, which has rarely if ever been met, is now receding further and further from realization, leaving the Secretary of State in violation of the law.

State Department spokesman Ian C. Kelly did not respond to a request for comment on the Department’s continuing violation of the law on FRUS publication.

But William B. McAllister, the Acting General Editor of FRUS, expressed a hopeful view of the future despite recent turmoil, which included the last-minute withdrawal of person who was to become the new FRUS General Editor. He said that a third FRUS volume on “Foreign Economic Policy, 1973-1976″ would appear before the end of the year, and at least one other in January 2010.

Likewise, Dr. Robert McMahon, who chairs the State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, said “We continue to be optimistic about publication prospects for FRUS volumes in the near future despite the disappointing number of volumes that came out this year. There are four Vietnam volumes alone that should be published in 2010.”

“We anticipate being able to fill all [employment] vacancies in 2010, many of them rather early in the year,” Dr. McAllister wrote in an email message. “The Office of the Historian is … well on its way to resolving the multiple infrastructure, document handling, and archival access issues that impact FRUS production…. The Office of the Historian has launched several initiatives to address systemic impediments that slow the declassification process.” And over time, “we anticipate returning to a more typical production cycle.” But a typical production cycle has never yet meant regular compliance with the mandatory 30 year FRUS publication requirement.

The latest FRUS volume on “Global Issues, 1973-1976″ has a number of interesting features and a few peculiarities. Oddly, all of the documents were marked as declassified in December 2008, so this collection was apparently ready for publication online a year ago. And unlike other contemporaneous FRUS volumes, audio tapes are not listed as a source and were apparently not used in the collection. No explanation for this omission was offered.