In an outstanding op-ed on today’s Washington Post, David A. Dana (Kirkland & Ellis professor of law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) and Susan P. Koniak (professor of law at Boston University School of Law) outline the costs to society of ‘court-sanctioned secrecy and nondisclosure agreements.’ In discussing the current environment, they note

Our courts and our legislators are guilty. Over the past few weeks, we have seen how our legal system has empowered and encouraged sexual predators to continue abusing women through secret settlements and nondisclosure agreements, despite knowing how dangerous silence can be.

Now is different, we’re told. A “cultural moment.” Laws will be reformed. Courts will change their rules. Lawyers, corporations, the American Bar Association and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation will do a 180 and end their hawking of secrecy.

And pigs will fly.

Indeed, although public attention is at this moment focused on an obscure congressional fund used to secretly settle sexual harassment claims against lawmakers with taxpayer money,

Congress is not alone. Some local and state government agencies also use taxpayer funds to secretly settle in cases of police brutality and other serious wrongs, leaving the public in the dark on the facts.

To center the debate solely on secret settlements in government, however, is a mistake. Defective fuel tanks and tires that explode, toxic chemical spills, the Dalkon Shield, leaky breast implants, GM’s faulty ignitions and asbestos-saturated air — each of these examples involves dangers to the public that lawyers and companies have kept hidden through agreements that prevent victims from speaking out.

Most courts in the United States allow vital information to be kept from the public. Only a handful of states have passed legislation limiting secrecy in cases that involve substantial public hazards. And even in those few states with legislation, the “hazards” are generally too narrowly defined, not covering, for example, cases of sexual abuse, harassment or racism in the workplace.

Dana and Koniak additionally focus attention on the question of cui bono—beyond the wrong-doers.

Their commentary is a strong and important addition to the current discussion.

In it’s most recent update to a disturbing and deeply-researched ongoing report, ProPublica documents the state of toxic pollution left behind by the military across the U.S. This is a problem of massive proportions that is more than three decades in the making — ever since

Congress banned American industries and localities from disposing of hazardous waste in these sorts of “open burns,” concluding that such uncontrolled processes created potentially unacceptable health and environmental hazards. Companies that had openly burned waste for generations were required to install incinerators with smokestacks and filters and to adhere to strict limits on what was released into the air. Lawmakers granted the Pentagon and its contractors a temporary reprieve from those rules to give engineers time to address the unique aspects of destroying explosive military waste.

A quarter of a century ago, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution that ordered the Department of Defense to halt the practice “as soon as possible.”

As part of this investigation, ProPublica acquired a dataset of all facilities that the Department of Defense considers contaminated—and have used the data to publish an interactive news application called Bombs in Your Backyard that enables the public to find hazardous sites near them — and learn what, if anything, is being done to remedy the pollution.

The “what, if anything, is being done to remedy the pollution” is a telling saga of the Pentagon turning its head to avoid confronting the devastation created by its “open burn” policy and practice.  It merits a close reading. Below are some highlights on the secrecy and lack of accountability aspects.

ProPublica points to federal records identify nearly 200 sites that have been or are still being used to open-burn hazardous explosives across the country. Some blow up aging stockpile bombs in open fields. Others burn bullets, weapons parts and…raw explosives in bonfire-like piles.  While the “facilities operate under special government permits that are supposed to keep the process safe, limiting the release of toxins to levels well below what the government thinks can make people sick,” according to ProPublica, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, which governs the process under federal law, acknowledge that the permits provide scant protection.  Indeed, internal EPA records obtained by ProPublica show there are

…at least 51 active sites across the country where the Department of Defense or its contractors are today burning or detonating munitions or raw explosives in the open air, often in close proximity to schools, homes and water supplies. The documents — EPA PowerPoint presentations made to senior agency staff — describe something of a runaway national program, based on “a dirty technology” with “virtually no emissions controls.” According to officials at the agency, the military’s open burn program not only results in extensive contamination, but “staggering” cleanup costs that can reach more than half a billion dollars at a single site.

The sites of open burns — including those operated by private contractors and the Department of Energy — have led to 54 separate federal Superfund declarations and have exposed the people who live near them to dangers that will persist for generations.  …

Of course, the Pentagon could determine with greater accuracy any possible health threat. It could, for instance, actually sample and test the emissions generated by the burns. Aside from a few research sites, neither the EPA nor the Pentagon was able to point to an example where this was done.

It has fallen to non-government researchers, however, to probe the depths of the Defense Department’s indifference to public health and safety:

ProPublica reviewed the open burns and detonations program as part of an unprecedented examination of America’s handling of munitions at sites in the United States, from their manufacture and testing to their disposal. We collected tens of thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed more than 100 state and local officials, lawmakers, military historians, scientists, toxicologists and Pentagon staff. Much of the information gathered has never before been released to the public, leaving the full extent of military-related pollution a secret. …. (Italics added)

“They are not subject to the kind of scrutiny and transparency and disclosure to the public as private sites are,” said Mathy Stanislaus, who until January worked on Department of Defense site cleanup issues as the assistant administrator for land and emergency management at the EPA.

ProPublica’s examination suggests that the Department of Defense has used an array of bureaucratic tools to shorten the list by almost any means legally available ever since Congress directed it to fix its contaminated sites. The agency also has for decades lobbied Congress for legislation that would make the military exempt from the nation’s most significant antipollution laws — the very laws that compel it to clean up old bases in the first place, and has fought to steer the science that determines how some of the most poisonous contaminants are regulated.

It is depressing to note that such DoD resistance to following the law and protecting the health of their employees and their families — and the surrounding public —  is a recurrent theme. In 2011, POGO reported on Toxic Secrecy: The Marine Corps’ Cover-up of Water Contamination at Camp Lejeune, and a broad array of non-profit organizations allied to fight a attempt under the auspices of the National Defense Authorization Act (since attempted on a regular basis) to to exempt from disclosure under the FOIA “information on military tactics, techniques, and procedures, and of military rules of engagement.” Just about anything they want to keep secret, in other words.  A coalition letter addressing the latest attempt is here.

In late 2016,  the threat of the impending Trump Administration to access to reliable and accurate government information caused a number of academic libraries, data scientists and others to initiate Data Refuge focused on climate and environmental data. The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), another collaboration, is focused on potential threats to federal environmental and energy policy, and to the scientific research infrastructure built to investigate, inform, and enforce them. Its Capacity and Governance working group monitors changes to federal agency governance, budgets, enforcement, scientific research, and rulemaking capacity.ⁱ

At the time, openness advocates warned that the utility of government data could be easily undermined by not just being removed (or made difficult to find) but also by changes to the data fields. That warning has now proved true — but not in the areas that are being closely monitored by the above efforts. We have learned that it is not only the new leaders of environmental and energy agencies that are a threat to the accurate information needed to hold government accountable. FiveThirtyEight has documented that AG Sessions is yet another.

In late October, the site reported that “The First FBI Crime Report Issued Under Trump Is Missing A Ton Of Info“:

Every year, the FBI releases a report that is considered the gold standard for tracking crime statistics in the United States: the Crime in the United States report, a collection of crime statistics gathered from over 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in cities around the country. But according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, the 2016 Crime in the United States report — the first released under President Trump’s administration — contains close to 70 percent fewer data tablesI than the 2015 version did, a removal that could affect analysts’ understanding of crime trends in the country. The removal comes after consecutive years in which violent crime rose nationally, and it limits access to high-quality crime data that could help inform solutions.  …

Among the data missing from the 2016 report is information on arrests, the circumstances of homicides (such as the relationships between victims and perpetrators), and the only national estimate of annual gang murders.

While changes to the report typically go through a body called the Advisory Policy Board (APB), responsible for managing and reviewing operational issues for a number of FBI programs, these changes did not. Rather, the FBI Office of Public Affairs — rather than the Advisory Policy Board — determined which data tables to remove  based on a “review the number of times a user actually viewed the tables on the internet.”

So, can a concerned person or organization obtain the removed fields?  According to FiveThirtyEight,

While the UCR says that the data no longer included in the report was available upon request, the FBI only provided a raw data file, which is more difficult to analyze — especially compared to easily accessible data tables — and does not always match the figures posted online in the UCR reports.³

The FBI noted that in addition to its decision to streamline the report, UCR had launched a Crime Data Explorer, which aims to make crime data more user-interactive. But data contained in the explorer does not replicate what is missing from the 2016 UCR report, and it doesn’t allow users to view data for particular years, but rather aggregates trends over a minimum period of 10 years. The National Incident-Based Reporting System is another tool the FBI uses to provide more detailed information on crimes, but it too does not replicate what is missing from the 2016 UCR report and has a substantially lower participation rate⁴ from police departments across the country.

ⁱ The End of Term Harvest and subsequent EOT Web Archive also received intense new interest.The Web Archive contains federal government websites (.gov, .mil, etc) in the Legislative, Executive, or Judicial branches of the government — with a focus on websites that were at risk of changing (i.e., whitehouse.gov) or disappearing altogether during government transitions.

Recently, the CIA has been in the news. This in itself is unusual and the contexts of the news stories makes it even more so.  None of the stories are good news for public accountability.

On October 17, Reuters reported “CIA says mistakenly ‘shredded’ Senate torture report then did not” according to Christopher Sharpley, the acting CIA Inspector General, during his confirmation hearing before Senate Intelligence Committee as President Trump’s nominee for the position.

Sharpley said the CIA received the report in December 2014 on a computer disk, which was then uploaded into a classified system. Shortly thereafter, he said, the agency was told to delete it because of ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

An email was sent saying the disk should not be destroyed, but Sharpley said he was told months later it could not be found and that an employee said it had been shredded.

But he said the disk was discovered later, after the FOIA litigation concluded that the report was a “congressional” document not subject to FOIA requests.

Sharpley said around that time, (Senator Richard) Burr (chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), asked him to return the disk and he did so. (Emphasis added)

The timing is interesting….

Of course, Sharpley neglected to mention that the DC circuit ruled it was a congressional record for purposes of FOIA, and that the court explicitly said Burr’s letter was entitled to zero weight:

Before turning to an application of the law to the facts of this case, we must make it clear that we can give no weight to the letter sent by now-Senate Committee Chairman Richard Burr to the President in January 2015. The letter was sent after Appellants had submitted their FOIA request and after they had filed suit in the District Court. Therefore, the letter is a “post-hoc objection[] to disclosure,” and, as such, it “cannot manifest the clear assertion of congressional control that our case law requires.”

Sharpley also would not commit to protecting any future reports, such as one related to the committee’s probe of potential links between Trump’s campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. This brought a rebuke from Senator Wyden:

“I think your highest duty here is to follow the law. The notion that the chairman asked for it and that’s all that governed your judgment isn’t acceptable to me.”

The above scenario is troubling enough. A POGO report the previous day—the day before the confirmation hearing—adds to the concerns.  As POGO points out, the Office of the Inspector General depends on whistleblowers to report waste, fraud, and other abuses. In the case of the CIA, however,

President Trump’s nominee to be the Central Intelligence Agency’s Inspector General—its top independent watchdog—is named in at least three open whistleblower retaliation cases.  …

Despite a statement POGO received from a senior Republican Senate staffer that Congress has a need-to-know: “There’s no question that information about outstanding retaliation cases involving Sharpley should be fully disclosed before members of Congress are asked to approve such a key CIA official,” POGO notes

It remains unclear whether Sharpley or the CIA has disclosed to Congress a complete list of the open matters, or any details concerning them. If not, Congress may still learn about them through other avenues: key members of a confirming committee are often provided any FBI files that contain details of cases involving the nominee, potentially including criminal or administrative matters. Such material, if it is available, is likely to be of interest for the Senate Intelligence Committee, which must examine Sharpley’s fitness for office, as well as to members of the Whistleblower Protection Caucus and of the full Senate, who will be required to vote on his confirmation.

The Committee has not yet voted on Sharpley’s nomination.

Moving from the IG to the Director’s office, on October 20, the Washington Post reported that, according to CIA Director Mick Pompeo,

“The intelligence community’s assessment is that the Russian meddling that took place did not affect the outcome of the election.”

As the Report states, however

This report includes an analytic assessment drafted and coordinated among The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and The National Security Agency (NSA), which draws on intelligence information collected and disseminated by those three agencies. It covers the motivation and scope of Moscow’s intentions regarding US elections and Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion. The assessment focuses on activities aimed at the 2016 US presidential election and draws on our understanding of previous Russian influence operations. When we use the term “we” it refers to an assessment by all three agencies.

…

We did not make an assessment of the impact that Russian activities had on the outcome of the 2016 election. The US Intelligence Community is charged with monitoring and assessing the intentions, capabilities, and actions of foreign actors; it does not analyze US political processes or US public opinion. (Emphasis added)

Greg Miller noted in the Post article that

“Pompeo’s mischaracterization of the intelligence report was the latest in a series of statements from the former Republican congressman that have seemed aimed at minimizing the significance of Russian interference in the 2016 election.”