"Congress is singing a remarkably new tune about security at the Department of Energy," Steven Aftergood writes in his regular e-mail publication, "Secrecy News." He directs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy,
"The modest reference to an 'alleged' loss of nuclear weapons secrets is a significant retreat from the past insistence by the congressional Cox Committee and others that China simply 'stole' the nation's 'most sophisticated nuclear weapons technology,' " Aftergood writes.
He adds that a "furor" in Congress over suspected espionage at Los Alamos led to an "indiscriminate" security buildup at the labs that included proposals to require thousands of scientists to submit to polygraph testing. "But now Congress implicitly acknowledges that the security frenzy it inspired has exceeded reasonable boundaries," Aftergood concludes.
IN-Q-TEL REVIEW: A group called Business Executives for National Security has completed a congressionally mandated assessment of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's unclassified venture capital fund, finding that it represents a promising model for developing new information technologies, intelligence sources said.
But the group's study, sent to the House and Senate intelligence committees yesterday, found that the "interface" between In-Q-Tel and the CIA is not what it should be, the sources said.
In a final message to CIA employees in January, retiring Inspector General L. Britt Snider called In-Q-Tel "the first significant step" toward bridging the huge divide between the open, entrepreneurial world of information technology and the closed, classified world of the intelligence community.
"Agency managers and overseers," Snider wrote, "must find a way to make it work."
Vernon Loeb's e-mail address is loebv@washpost.com.
