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Aftergood discontinues SecrecyNews. Thanks for the decades of work toward government transparency!
Happy 2022! We were on a brief hiatus here at FGI but are back in the saddle and looking to return to active blogger status in 2022. We’re always looking for others to help us track on government information and libraries, so contact me if you’d like to try your hand at posting (freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com).
It’s only fitting that our first post back should be to honor the great Steve Aftergood. Aftergood is the long-running author of the brilliant Secrecy News newsletter from the Federation of American Scientists, publisher of thousands(!) of Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports and all kinds of other critical formerly secret and/or hard-to-come-by government publications – many of which made their way into library collections and catalogs, rippling out to students and researchers for many years to come! Steve’s work has been so impactful on many disciplines and on many people (whether they know it or not, and that, IMHO is the mark of a great person!). His long and distinguished service to government policy and accountability should be lauded by all.
For those who don’t know him – and for those who do! – you’ll be better for reading his autobiographical essay “H-Diplo Essay 359- Steven Aftergood on Learning the Scholar’s Craft”.
Our sincere thanks and gratitude to Steve Aftergood!
Steve Aftergood, the scholar who authored the amazing Secrecy News newsletter for two decades, gathered and published tens of thousands of CRS reports over the decades, was responsible for publishing the Intelligence Community’s top line budget number, and successfully brought a scientific bent to questions of government policy — especially around government secrecy — has discontinued his program at the Federation of American Scientists, where he was first hired in 1989. Steve assures me he has not retired and merely is in transition. His essay on his experiences are worth reading, he still replies to emails, and we owe a debt of gratitude for Steve’s long service towards advancing government transparency and accountability and his collegiality towards all of us who have spent our careers learning from him.
[HT Daniel Schuman at First Branch Forecast who let us know about this breaking news!]
Aftergood a tireless advocate for the release of CRS reports
Steven Aftergood (of the Federation of American Scientists and Secrecy News) has long been working on the issue of releasing Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports out to the public. In fact, for many years, he’s posted them on his site in spite of the fact that the federal government refuses to publish and distribute CRS reports to federal depository libraries and the public.
In a post a couple of weeks ago (yes I’m behind!) entitled, “CRS Reports Are Still Out of Bounds,” Aftergood highlighted exactly why CRS reports are so important and why they need to be accessible (go to the story for live links to the reports mentioned):
When a military judge ruled last month that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could be tried for war crimes, the first footnote in his July 14 opinion (pdf) was to a Congressional Research Service report. (Hamdan was convicted yesterday for material support of terrorism.)
But Military Judge Keith J. Allred, lacking an official source for the CRS analysis by Jennifer K. Elsea (with which he ultimately differed), provided a link instead (see footnote 1 on page 3) to a copy of the document on the Federation of American Scientists web site.
By doing so, the Judge simultaneously highlighted the centrality of such CRS analyses to public discourse and the strange fact that these official documents are still not approved for direct release to the public.
Perhaps he also implicitly affirmed that FAS and other public interest publishers of CRS collections are helping to compensate for that continuing policy defect by providing the online access to CRS reports that Congress has denied.
Way to go Steven Aftergood and Secrecy News!!
And on the shameless plug side of things, I’ve begun harvesting sites that post digital CRS reports (including FAS) and making them searchable and accessible at the Internet Archive. Please check out the site and let me know if there are other sites that I’ve missed (jrjacobs AT stanford DOT edu).
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