Source: Marc Ambinder “>Visit W3Schools! , The Atlantic.
Even as the new government-wide cyber coordinator, Howard Schmidt, pledged to promote transparency as the government moves to protect cyberspace, the administration won’t release a legal memorandum that many, including the one-time head of its cyber security review, hoped would be made public. The memo was drafted as an appendix to the White House Cyberspace Policy Review led by Melissa Hathaway, at the time the acting senior director for cyber issues at the National Security Council. Hathaway has since left the government. She has told colleagues that the White House overruled her decision to release the legal annex. Administration officials dispute the idea that it was her decision to make in the first place.
Speaking at last year’s RSA conference, Hathaway praised the review process for its “unprecedented transparency.” A footnote in the appendix of the main report notes that the legal analysis was not intended to be of the type that would or could influence policy. And the report itself calls for a new interagency legal review team — the team that would produce products for internal, executive-branch only deliberation.
Hathaway, in discussing the review the next week, expressed enthusiasm about the legal review to an audience of intelligence professionals and journalists at a conference in Virginia. Bob Gourley, a former senior intelligence official, blogged after the event that Hathaway bragged about the comprehensiveness of the legal review. Gourley noted that the legal annex “captures some of some of the opinion of federal legal experts from across the government.”