Last month, Rep Nunn (R,IA) introduced HR 9071, the UAS Threat Disclosure Act. The bill would require the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to declassify information related to the security threats posed by Chinese unmanned aircraft systems and provide an unclassified report to Congress on the same. No new funding is authorized by this legislation.
Moving Forward
Neither Nunn nor his two cosponsors are member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that it is unlikely that there is sufficient influence to see the bill considered in Committee. I do not expect that there would be a great deal of interest in that Committee for seeing this information declassified. They already have access to the classified versions of the data and would generally be more supportive of the continuing protections of ‘means and sources’ that such security classifications provide.
Commentary
This is an odd bill. Nunn and his cosponsors are all members
of the House Armed Services Committee, so they should be well familiar with the
intelligence communities’ interest in protecting means and sources. Requiring
unredacted information in an unclassified report to Congress would be sure to
raise the ire of the DNI. Furthermore, the bill does not provide any reasoning
to support the need for this widespread declassification mandate. Finally, the ‘unless’
clause in §2(a)(3)
is an admission by the crafters of this bill that they are looking for too wide
a declassification effort.
For more details about the provisions of this bill,
including expanded commentary, see my article on CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/hr-9071-introduced
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