CIA BUDGET REVEALED — 42 YEARS LATE

It’s ridicu­lous that it has come to this, but…
“A fed­eral judge yes­ter­day ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to dis­close its 1963 bud­get, mark­ing the first time that a court has com­pelled the CIA to sur­ren­der intel­li­gence bud­get infor­ma­tion,” Defense Tech pal Steven Aftergood writes in today’s Secrecy News.
It is “ORDERED that the defen­dant [CIA] shall dis­close the CIA bud­get fig­ure for 1963 by May 6, 2005,” rules Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit filed by Aftergood.

In fact, the 1963 CIA bud­get fig­ure — $550 mil­lion — is already known. Although CIA said it could not be dis­closed, FAS [the Federation of American Scientists] showed (with the assis­tance of Prof. David Barrett of Villanova University) that it had been qui­etly declas­si­fied and released years ago. As a result, Judge Urbina deter­mined that it was no longer exempt from dis­clo­sure under the FOIA.
Meanwhile, the 1962 CIA bud­get and the 1964 CIA bud­get, like most other intel­li­gence bud­get fig­ures since 1947, con­tinue to be with­held.
It is CIA’s con­tention that dis­clo­sure of such bud­get fig­ures could lead to the com­pro­mise of an intel­li­gence method, namely the method by which Agency fund­ing is hid­den in the pub­lished bud­get. The court accepted this argu­ment, based on the sworn dec­la­ra­tion of Acting Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin in September 2004.
But as it hap­pens, CIA’s argu­ment is false. It is method­olog­i­cally impos­si­ble to deduce or infer the clan­des­tine fund­ing mech­a­nism from the total Agency bud­get fig­ure, since there are too many vari­ables involved. First of all, the num­ber and iden­tity of bud­get line items used to chan­nel CIA funds is not con­stant. But even if those were some­how known, which they gen­er­ally are not, there is no way to deter­mine how the bud­get total is allo­cated among them.
Judge Urbina rejected this cri­tique of ours, con­clud­ing that it is a sub­jec­tive opin­ion that is not legally com­pelling. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the dis­clo­sure of the CIA 1963 bud­get fig­ure has not com­pro­mised the fund­ing mech­a­nism for that year. (Whether it would mat­ter if it had been com­pro­mised is a sep­a­rate question.)

THERE’S MORE: The government’s res­i­dent keep­ers of all things clas­si­fied, the Information Security Oversight Office, released its annual report yes­ter­day. All told, there were 15,645,237 clas­si­fi­ca­tion actions last year, up from 14.2 mil­lion in 2003.

April 5th, 2005 | Cloak and Dagger | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.