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Citizen's Guide to Getting the Goods
The Freedom of Information Act isn't just for journalists or activist groups -- citizens (with and without blogs) can also petition the federal government to turn over documents. While it's rather simple to file a request, it's a bit more complicated to file one that actually gets you information.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which hired two of the best FOIA filers in the country this summer, just updated its legal guide for bloggers with a FOIA primer.
How do I know what to ask for?
News articles, government reports, press releases, and Congressional hearings are good starting points for thinking up FOIA request ideas.
How do I make a FOIA request?
You can make a FOIA request by mailing or faxing a letter to the agency. You may also be able to submit your request by email. Check the agency's web site for information about how and where to send requests.
Are there any step-by-step guides for writing and submitting FOIA requests?
Yes. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has published a guide called How To Use the Federal FOI Act, and also has a FOI Letter Generator. The National Security Archive also has helpful guidance for FOIA requesters.
It's a bit simplified since government agencies vary widely in their attitude towards requests. The best advice is to make your request very narrow. Ask for a report by name (for instance, ask for the Pentagon's Inspector General's report on the Iraqi National Congress), instead of asking for all agency records about Chalabi and the INC. (BTW, there's a good possibility that report exists and hasn't been published).
Another fun place to start would be to follow on Michael Ravnitzky's FOIA work, which unearthed the indexes to four internal NSA publications, whose articles have tantalizing titles like "Was a Cryptologic Corporal." All you have to do is look through the indexes, find a title or two that interests you and ask for it. You just might get it.
Another place to get inspired is Russ Kick's The Memory Hole, a collection of documents he's built with FOIA requests he's filed after reading news articles. For instance, he's the one who got official pictures of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq when they landed at Dover Air Force base, after the photography ban was debated in the news.
You could be charged a small amount, but generally if it's going to be more than $25 dollars or so in fees, the agency will let you know.
And if an agency stonewalls you or ignores you, well, you can either sue yourself (not a good idea and even if you win, you don't get attorney's fees) or ask a group like EPIC or the First Amendment Center or a public interest law clinic to help.
Think of it like a letter to the editor or your congress critter, it's something every citizen should try at least once.
On an unrelated note, I'm pretty honored that Noah handed me the keys and I'll likely be focusing mostly on anti-terrorism and government database stuff since that's my normal beat.
But keep the tips and comments coming and together we'll keep DefenseTech humming while Noah racks up speeding tickets in 10 different states.
Rapid Fire 10/30/06
* Airborne Anti-Missile Laser Actually a "Light Saber"
* From Barbary War II to Iraq War in 90 sec Flash
* Gov puts RFID in IDs, Despite Damning Report (shameless self-promotion)
* Letter From Iraq Goes Viral
* U.S.-provided Weapons Untraceable in Iraq
* Blair Outsourcing Iraq War?
* Ahmadinejad to Sanctions: Bring It On
* Pakistani Gunships Attack Radical Madrasa, Kill 80
- Ryan Singel
(Big ups: RC, Michael Wilde)
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Singel Signs In
Ryan Singel has broken some of the biggest privacy and security stories of the last few years -- like AT&T;'s cheek-to-cheek cooperation with the NSA's domestic spying, and Jet Blue's fishy use of customer records, to test a federal passenger-screening database. These days, he heads up Wired News' horribly-named, must-read security blog, 27B Stroke 6. And he's still scooping folks on the regular; check out his coverage of the roll-your-own boarding pass generator.
So I am really fired up to have someone with this strong a track record blogging for Defense Tech. He'll be taking over the site this week, as I pack up for -- and drive out to -- Los Angeles, where I'll be spending the next few months.
Be good to my whiskey buddy Ryan. Send him tips. I'll see y'all on the other side.
Milblogger Clamp Down Blows Up
 For the last couple of weeks, Defense Tech has been looking into the increasingly hostile atmosphere that soldier- journalists -- milbloggers -- have been facing. Now, a bunch of bigger outlets have picked up on the story -- and advanced it several steps.
Stars & Stripes:
The [Army's] August order [about blogs] specifically states that soldiers may not create or update their blogs during duty hours, and the sites must not 'contain information on military activities that is not available to the general public.'
That includes 'comments on daily military activities and operations, unit morale, results of operations, status of equipment, and other information that may be beneficial to adversaries.'
If soldiers are found violating those rules, both the servicemembers and their commanding officers are notified... leadership can decide what punishment, if any, the soldiers should face...
Noah Shachtman, editor of defensetech.org, said... "The fact that soldiers want to write about their experiences is something that should be embraced by the Army... They’re not looking to bad-mouth the military. They’re looking to talk proudly about their experiences."
AP:
"We are not a law enforcement or intelligence agency. Nor are we political correctness enforcers," Lt. Col. Stephen Warnock, [head of the Virginia National Guard "Big Brother" website-monitoring unit] said. "We are simply trying to identify harmful Internet content and make the authors aware of the possible misuse of the information by groups who may want to damage United States interests."
Some bloggers say the guidelines are too ambiguous - a sentiment that has led others to pre-emptively shut down or alter their blogs.
"It's impossible to determine when something crosses the line from not a violation to a violation. It's like trying to define what pornography is or bad taste in music," said Spc. Jason Hartley, 32, who says he was demoted from sergeant and fined for reposting a blog he created while deployed to Iraq with the New York Army National Guard.
According to Hartley, the Army had forced him to stop the blog even before the oversight operation existed, citing pictures he had posted of Iraqi detainees and discussions of how he loaded a weapon and the route his unit took to get to Iraq.
Wired News' Xeni Jardin (who has the best story of the lot):
Blackfive's [Matt] Burden says soldiers are receiving mixed messages: some receive approval from their immediate commanders, only later to be rebuked by more senior officials. Burden says his site and another milblog, Armor Geddon, were once featured in an internal Army PowerPoint presentation which described both as serious operational security risks.
"That kind of message from the administration of the Army sends a chilling signal to a young soldier who was told by his commander that it was okay to do what he was doing," Burden told Wired News.
He and fellow milbloggers gathered this year in April for a first ever MilBlog Conference in Washington, DC. They plan to reconvene in May, 2007. Debate over how to address authorities' OPSEC concerns without creating a "chilling effect" among bloggers was a heated topic at the 2006 gathering.
"My advice would be to bring together active duty, reserve and veteran bloggers to take a look at this issue in a way that would help the military," Burden says, "There's a lot of positive information coming from these 1,200 or so military blogs, and if it's not positive, it's giving people a better understanding of what it's like to be a soldier or the family of a soldier fighting this war."
Active duty milblogger John Noonan co-edits OPFOR (military slang for "opposing force") and posts on such topics as "foreign policy, wargaming, grand strategy and hippy bashing."
Noonan is among those who believe the current flap is partly the result of a generation gap between younger, tech-savvy recruits for whom life online is second nature and older, more senior military officials who don't get the net and are accustomed to the military's long-established history of carefully monitoring release of information from the battlefield.
"They don't want to lose the traditional control they've had over information released from the battlefield to the American people," Noonan said. "It's counterintuitive for military guys who are used to total control over what information is released and what isn't, to all of a sudden having zero control."
Xeni also filed a story for NPR's Day to Day, which should air this afternoon.
UPDATE 3:01 PM: The NPR segment is up now.
Iraqi Forces Don't Suck ... Entirely
Despite what you might have heard from other media, the Iraqi Army does not suck. In fact, by regional standards, it's a fine little army: well-armed, well-led and capable of defeating terrorists and insurgents in a stand-up fight. It wasn't always that way, but the coalition's clean-sheet approach and years of hard work by training teams has really paid off.
 But the Iraqi Army has two major weaknesses. First, its units are locally recruited, like the U.S. National Guard. This combined with Iraqis' overriding allegiance to tribe over nation means that most of them refuse to deploy when ordered to do so by Baghdad. Those units that have agreed to deploy, such as the highly disciplined Kurdish battalon sent to the Shiite town of Balad early this year, have been besieged in their forward operation bases by xenophobic locals.
But even if they were willing to deploy, most units are incapable of sustaining themselves far from their major bases for very long. This is the second major weakness. I go into detail in a new National Defense feature:
The [Iraqi] 10th Division is capable of planning and executing its own missions, but usually operates alongside British forces. The division, a light infantry formation, has four brigades each with two line battalions of 800 troops apiece, plus engineer and bomb disposal companies. Small divisional attachments including signals troops and military police are just now standing up with foreign assistance. There are currently no organic logistics troops.
This is consistent with the overall structure of the Iraqi Army. No more than 15 percent of Iraq’s 120,000 soldiers are involved in logistics, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Gerald Ostlund told the Associated Press. By contrast, Western armies feature more logisticians than combat troops.
"What you see is what you get," [British Army Lt. Col. Tim] Barrett says, referring to the 10th Division's infantry-heavy structure. While the battalions are adequately equipped with light arms and machine guns, there is a "desperate need" for vehicles, Lateef says. Currently, a handful of Russian-built medium trucks comprise the division’s major motor assets.
A dearth of vehicles plus a broader lack of logistical support means the 10th Division is incapable of sustaining operations away from its bases for more than a few hours, according to Barrett. This effectively limits it to urban operations in Basra and short sorties from a handful of rural installations.
What all this means is that the Iraqi Army will, for the time being, remain a local defense force. A good local defense force, mind you, but local nonetheless. So when Baghdad goes to shit, as it did a couple months back, the national government has few options for boosting the number of troops in the city. All it can do is try to recruit more troops locally ... and call for U.S. and British help.
--David Axe
Air Force Electronic Attacks Stymied
The situation isn't too bad right now, fighting a low-tech foe. But Air Force planners are deeply worried about the future, and the service's abilities to take out enemy radars. The flyboys' airborne electronic attack (AEA) efforts -- zapping opponents' air defenses, with big bursts of radar energy -- are in disarray, reports Air Force magazine.
 "Last year, the Air Force canceled its central AEA program, the B-52 Standoff Jammer." Then, the Air Force was taken off the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System killer drone project, which the Air Force was planning to use "as a radar jammer loitering directly over enemy air defenses. It is no exaggeration to say that the Air Force AEA roadmap, which was years in the making, virtually collapsed."
The Air Force faces a hard deadline for bringing on new operational AEA capability. Since 1999, it has been sharing the Navy’s four-seat EA-6B Prowler escort jammer aircraft, but the Prowler fleet begins retiring in 2009... For some time, plans have called for USAF by then to be out of the Navy’s program and fielding its own system.
The airborne electronic attack business comprises five primary disciplines, each taking the action progressively closer to the target... [From long-range, stand-off strikes to point-blank jamming to cyber attacks which] cause an enemy radar to think it’s a washing machine and go into the rinse cycle.
The problem is, these are all very different jobs. No single aircraft is going to be able to handle them all. Not a revamped B-52 or F-15E, not the Navy's Prowler $100 million-per-plane replacement, and not even the new F-22 fighters, equipped with next-gen radars.
So now the idea is patch together lots and lots of different types of aircraft, including the Joint Strike Fighter and "the Miniature Air-Launched Decoy... a smallish missile that emulates the radar signatures of other aircraft and, it is hoped, will draw the fire of enemy air defenses."
There are "so many different components and pieces and parts," one Air Force official tells the magazine. "It gets very complex. ... It’s just a matter of what we can afford and what kind of risk will we assume if we don’t have all the pieces together."
Army Reshuffles for Long War
"Pentagon records show one-fifth of the Army's active-duty troops have served multiple tours of war duty while more than 40% haven't been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan," reports USA Today.
 So the Army is "realign[ing] its forces to prevent a small slice of soldiers who are shouldering much of the fighting from wearing out."
The Army is moving soldiers from specialties such as artillery and air defense to high-demand roles: infantry, engineering, military police and intelligence, Special Forces, civil affairs and psychological operations, said Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle, deputy chief of staff for Army personnel.
Makes sense to me. What do you guys think? And if the Army is doing this, isn't the next logical step to ship more -- way more -- Navy and Air Force types to the Sandbox, too?
Rapid Fire 10/26/06
* OMB disses Army
* NASA launches Sun-spotters
* Net gambling vs. port security
* Border fence approved...
* ... or is it?
* Military e-voting FUBAR
* Brits test stims
* Nuke security worse than you think
* Russian missile flop
* When spy sats were young
* New views through drones' eyes
* Shallow water mine fighter
(Big ups: RC)
Red Teaming Tomorrow's Radars
Nicholas Weaver is a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in California. This is the first in an occasional series for Defense Tech.
 In the past, military technology might have consistently outpaced civilian gear. Not any more.
Civilian electronics, manufacturing, and development cycles have radically shortened and improved. The computer which runs the F-22 is an absolute design marvel for its time, for example: 700 MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second), approximately 300 Megabytes of memory, and some 20 billion DSP [digital signal processing] style operations.
Yet its time was the late 80s and early 90s, when much of the hardware was finalized. Today, a Playstation 3 meets or exceeds this performance, for $600 instead of perhaps $30,000,000. (Of course, the F22's avionics are considerably more robust and presumably more reliable.)
So the question becomes, what happens if America's opponents start massively adopting commercial technology and commercial design styles? In Iraq, insurgents are already using commercial gear to build and trigger bombs. But it's not hard to imagine absorption on a much broader scale. After all, the weapon business is a business, there are brilliant engineers around the world, and the basic building blocks continue to grow more sophisticated.
This occasional series of speculations will attempt to predict that future, by technological "red-teaming," sketching out what an opponent could do. This first article attempts to postulate what the future of air defense radar will be, and how it will force radical changes in US military operations.
Yet Another Milblogger Forced Out
Tanker Brothers is a blog from a pair of Abrams operators, initially set up to "express their frustration at the lack of American support for the Iraq conflict and to pay tribute to their Military heritage of Patriotism and Honor." The site is one of the featured blogs at Military.com, and is in the top ten at BestMilitarySites.com.
 Despite all that, the site is about to go dark, come Veterans' Day.
Make no mistake, it has nothing to do with not wanting to Blog anymore: on the contrary, this has been a labor of love for me. I started this blog with one goal, and only one goal: to let the American Public know what was REALLY going on in Iraq... Unfortunately.... sometimes things don't always work out the way we want them to.
As my readers know, my little brother has already deployed to Iraq, and I'm literally on "the countdown" to when I get on a plane to join him. There was nothing more that I wanted to do than to continue this site, and even "kick it up a notch", since I would once again be on the ground.
With the new OPSEC paranoia, though, I don't think I would have the opportunity. The DoD is cracking down on MilBlogs, and I wouldn't be able to continue Blogging and still be compliant with AR 25-1, the Army's Regulation governing Personal Websites...
Now, unofficially speaking, I think the DoD is making a huge mistake crippling the MilBlog movement. MilBlogs have been instrumental at keeping the American Public informed, and getting the good news of the War on Terror out to people that would otherwise never hear it. And the American public is hungry for news like that. The American public is starving for news like that.
Isn't this exactly the kind of website that the Defense Department ought to be trying to keep online?
UPDATE 4:53 PM: "We're carried on [the official Army website] Stand To! pretty regularly...so we're good enough for the Army's senior leaders, but not good enough to keep blogging? It doesn't make sense," Tanker Brother Mike Gulf tells me.
I would never, ever compromise security, or put even one single Soldier's life in jeopardy. If there [is] even a small chance, I tank the story. Even CENTCOM tells me I'm "good to go", to which my response was: "Then show me how I can [comlly] AR 25-1, and show me a way to post!"
The DoD should be embracing the MilBlog Movement: we're the guys and gals actually getting the TRUTH out about the War, and encouraging support, and the American public to open thier eyes and get the view from guys on the ground.
(Big ups: OPFOR)
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