Classified Information
83 Articles
Just How Sensitive Was the Information Trump Reportedly Revealed to the Russians?
Given today’s bombshell report by the Washington Post claiming President Donald Trump revealed classified information relating to the Islamic State to senior Russian officials…
President-elect Trump’s Picks Redefine “Two-Tiered System of Justice”
With his selection of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to serve as national security adviser, his continued consideration of retired Gen. David Petraeus for a possible administration…
Looking Back on the Pentagon Papers Decision
In a hallway of The New York Times offices, there is a framed copy of the Telex traffic between the Justice Department and The Times from June 1971 when the government demanded…
Important First Step by HPSCI on Pre-Publication Review Reform
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. We are happy to learn, via Secrecy News, that the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) has weighed in constructively…
FOIA Litigation Has Its Own Rules, But We Deserve Better
When will federal judges start acting more like State Department flacks? It’s a question worth thinking about during Sunshine Week. For those of us who regularly litigate national…
Fixing Pre-Publication Review: What Should Be Done?
Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway called attention in several recent columns to the pre-publication review process (here, here, here, and here) that many current and former national…
The Scope of the Prepublication Review Problem, and What to Do About It
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. The problems in the prepublication review process that we identified in our Washington Post op-ed and in a subsequent post…
Path Dependence and the Prepublication Review Process
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. Over the weekend, we wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about the lifetime prepublication review process required of nearly…
More Problems With Prepublication Review
Editor’s note: This post also appears on Lawfare. Over the weekend, we published an op-ed in the Washington Post about the government’s broken prepublication review process.…
State of play of the SSCI report on the CIA interrogation program: the relationship between declassification and disclosure
Last Thursday, Senator Diane Feinstein, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), issued a statement that the SSCI had voted that afternoon “to…
Why the CIA? Why no U.S. acknowledgement?
Just to follow up on Ryan’s post: Mark Mazzetti’s story for the Times, assuming it is accurate, confirms what I tried to explain in a post a few weeks ago —…