New Law and National Security Report – No More Secrets: National Security Strategies for a Transparent World
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 3, 2011—Recent events highlight the difficulty of keeping secrets in today’s increasingly transparent world. A new report released by the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security summarizes workshop discussions led by national security experts identifying national security strategies for addressing this challenge. The group examined the implications of a world without secrets and what today’s secrets involve.
The team that convened included government, private sector, non-profit and academic national security experts. Although members of the working group did not all agree in every aspect of the discussion, there was general consensus that the government and private sector “confront an enormous challenge in trying to learn how to prevail in an increasingly transparent world.”
The report recommends that the government operate with fewer secrets to gain a significant advantage over those who “continue to cling to traditional notions of indefinite information monopoly.”
To schedule an interview, or for more information, please contact ABA Standing Committee staff director Holly McMahon at 202/662-1035 or Holly.McMahon@americanbar.org.
To access the report, go to www.abanet.org/natsecurity or www.nationalstrategy.com
Phi Beta Iota: Only twenty years after the Marine Corps took a stab at changing the paradigm (see “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's“), only eighteen years after “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, and Evolution, an Alternative Paradigm,” and only ten years after ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World. Now for the bad news: government is not smart, not agile, and not honest. The innovation is going to be outside government and the innovators are going to route around government. Hybrid networks based on trust and sharing information are going to replace both industrial-era government and archaic legal systems that favor those with money.
