#intelligence community

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Western governments have a track record of suppressing climate change intelligence assessments. Take the US spy community, for example. Despite decades of tracking and analyzing national security risks posed by climate change and making many of those intelligence products publicly available, the Office of the Director of Intelligence insists that it must keep a 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030” classified. Former intelligence officials have testified publicly about the report, cited the report in literature, and supported calls for the report’s declassification, to no avail. After almost two decades, the report remains classified to this day at the confidential level, the lowest level of national security secrecy. More recently, in 2022, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese asked the nation’s most senior intelligence chief Andrew Shearer to personally lead a review of security threats posed by the climate crisis. Months later, Albanese refused to release the report or even say when it had been completed. Defense spokesperson for Australia’s Green Party David Shoebridge dubbed the Aussie government the “cult of secrecy in Canberra.” Since then, Albanese has continued to reject calls to make “even a saniti[z]ed version of the assessment public.”

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It’s been well documented that intelligence agencies will sometimes withhold information to shield themselves from public shaming or awkwardness. The still-classified 2008 National Intelligence Council report is a perfect example of this phenomenon. In a 2021 Bulletin article, Thomas Fingar, the chair of the council at that time, stated that report “was kept classified because the United States didn’t want ambassadors from countries identified as especially vulnerable to climate change to start calling and asking for resources to help with mitigation and adaptation earlier than they would otherwise.” A similar instinct could very well be at play in the United Kingdom right now, with some outlets reporting that the prime minister may be withholding the unabridged DEFRA report to avoid public criticism that the government isn’t doing enough to stave off the worst effects of biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.

Esoteric Foreign Affairs Office

A lot of questions remain unanswered about how much the ever-tightening relationship between private AI and for-profit automated decision making systems will impact much needed transparency and accountability.

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/news/the-u-s-national-security-state-is-here-to-make-ai-even-less-transparent-and-accountable

Intelligence Community Warns on Election Day Eve that Russia Is Conducting ‘Additional Influence Operations’.

The intelligence community issued a public statement on the eve of the 2024 election to warn that foreign adversaries — “particularly Russia” — were conducting additional influence operations “intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of the U.S. elections.”

The statement, by the Biden Administration Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, released Monday said:

A few months ago, as a debate was heating up over whether to renew an FBI surveillance authority known as Section 702, I was looking for an unsealed court document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). I asked a colleague if FISC had a website where I could find these opinions. “Oh, that’s easy,” my colleague said. “Just check their Tumblr.” Sure enough, I found the document on the Tumblr in question: “IC on the Record,” a website “created at the direction of the President of the United States and maintained by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” which promised “direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” How did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—a senior-level agency representing the entire intelligence community including the CIA and the National Security Agency—come to host some of the most important docs on a platform better known for cat gifs, LGBTQ+ discourse, and indie sleaze? And why, 10 years later, after the internet moved beyond the cat gifs, Tumblr alienated its queer communities, and Gen Z went through a cycle of Tumblr-aesthetic nostalgia, is the government still in its Tumblr era?