Aftergood, Steven
Biography
Steven Aftergood directs the FAS Project on Government Secrecy. The Project works to reduce the scope of national security secrecy and to promote public access to government information.
He writes Secrecy News, which reports on new developments in secrecy policy for readers in media, government and among the general public.
In 1997, Mr. Aftergood was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency which led to the declassification and publication of the total intelligence budget for the first time in fifty years ($26.6 billion in FY 1997). In 2006, he won a FOIA lawsuit against the National Reconnaissance Office for release of unclassified budget records.
Mr. Aftergood is an electrical engineer by training (B.Sc., UCLA, 1977). His work on challenging government secrecy has been recognized with the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (2010), the James Madison Award from the American Library Association (2006), the Public Access to Government Information Award from the American Association of Law Libraries (2006), and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award from the Playboy Foundation (2004).
Selected Publications:
What Should Be Classified? Some Guiding Principles, prepared for the Open Society Justice Initiative, May 2011
National Security Secrecy: How the Limits Change, Social Research, Volume 77, No. 3, Fall 2010
Telling Secrets, Foreign Policy, October 18, 2010
Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works, Yale Law & Policy Review, Volume 27, No. 2, Spring 2009
The U.S. Highly Enriched Uranium Declaration: Transparency Deferred but Not Denied by Steven Aftergood and Frank von Hippel, Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2007
Polygraph Testing and the DOE National Laboratories, Science, Volume 290, No. 5493, 3 November 2000
Government Secrecy and Knowledge Production: A Survey of Some General Issues, Cornell University Peace Studies Program Occasional Paper #23, October 1999
Selected Congressional Testimony:
Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic Government, testimony before the the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, April 30, 2008
On strengthening the role of the Government Accountability Office in Intelligence Oversight, testimony before a subcommittee of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate, February 29, 2008
