THE DEMISE OF SENSITIVE HOMELAND SECURITY INFO (SHSI) http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2005/12/121205.html
Three years after Congress directed the President to develop government-wide procedures for protecting sensitive homeland security information (SHSI), no such procedures are in place and the effort to produce them has been all but formally abandoned, Secrecy News has learned. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 required the President to prescribe and implement procedures by which agencies would "identify and safeguard homeland security information that is sensitive but unclassified" (Section 892). In his July 2003 executive order 13311, President Bush assigned the Secretary of Homeland Security responsibility for complying with this requirement. But "as is true with so many other subjects, they have done nothing with it," said one U.S. Government official with subject matter expertise. He spoke on condition of anonymity. A government-wide policy on protecting SHSI "has been periodically discussed, pushed close to some action, and then sent back for further study. There are a dozen hard and fast deadlines that have been missed on this whole subject." "I think it's fair to say it's dead. The concept is not dead but it's highly unlikely anything will come of it." Because Congress failed to define the statutory meaning of "sensitive," critics including the Federation of American Scientists were concerned that the establishment of the "Sensitive Homeland Security Information" (SHSI) category was an invitation to formalize the indiscriminate withholding of information. "I think this is a case where no news is good news from your point of view," said the official, referring to the lack of progress on SHSI. Meanwhile, however, he said that a separate interagency initiative was underway to define and regulate the even broader category of "sensitive but unclassified" information. But "that is far too big a task to come to fruition," the official predicted. Given that agencies were unable to reach consensus on the definition of terrorism-related SHSI, it will be "exponentially more difficult" to come to agreement on the vastly larger and more amorphous domain of "sensitive but unclassified" information, he said. You are a subscribed member of the infowarrior list. Visit www.infowarrior.org for list information or to unsubscribe. This message may be redistributed freely in its entirety. Any and all copyrights appearing in list messages are maintained by their respective owners.
