http://hdl.handle.net/1813/47 Search the Channel search http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/simple-search http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11249 Title: Striking a Balance: Whistleblowing Protections in the Intelligence Community <br/> <br/>Authors: Herrera, Elizabeth Angela <br/> <br/>Abstract: Whistleblowing has become more important and more controversial as many federal employees take their information directly to the press. Despite the several federal statutes offering employees protections from reprisal for whistleblowing within their agencies, employees continue to take inside knowledge of corruption, scandal, waste, and mismanagement directly to the public via the media. Current whistleblowing laws protect government employees who utilize their agency?s internal grievance procedure, including informing their Inspector General?s office, Office of Personnel Management, or other human resource office. The laws typically do not protect employees who leak information to the press. Federal employees within the intelligence community however, were explicitly excluded from most protection clauses until 1990. Even after those laws were amended to cover federal employees, the statutes are still designed to favor the agency. As an example, federal employees from the Central Intelligence Agency have one of the most complicated procedures for correctly blowing the whistle on their agency and/or superiors. The CIA is required by law to protect their employees; however, national security provides the agency with a strong defense that makes these statutes almost meaningless for CIA agents. Several CIA agents have been fired or demoted due to their whistleblowing. To understand the consequences of excluding national security employees from the whistleblowing protection laws and the consequences of these exclusions, I will examine the legislative history of federal whistleblowing statutes and determine why national security agencies were excluded from coverage under these protection clauses. I will study the goals of various statutes, as described in Senate and House of Representative hearings and testimonies in the creation of several bills. I will focus on the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1987 that was vetoed by Ronald Reagan, the Intelligence Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 1999, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and its 1994 amendments, and the Notification of Federal Employees of Antidiscrimination and Retaliation Act of 2003. Also currently in Congress is the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2007 or H.R. 985 and the Federal Employee Protection of Disclosures Act or S. 274, which would add intelligence agency employees to protected groups when whistleblowing information is provided directly to authorized members of Congress or the agency?s internal office. I will then focus on the CIA and the process and procedures for handling employees? claims of wrongdoing within the agency. Currently whistleblowing literature focuses on business operations and mainstream government employees such as scientists, researchers and other professionals. Very little has been written on federal law enforcement employees such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA and others. In deciding to limit protections of national security employees in the whistleblowing statutes, it seems likely that Congress engaged in discussion about the consequences of including those employees in the protections. I will explore this question of whether Congress used national security as a rationale that effectively enables the federal government, particularly the executive branch, to knowingly participate in wrongdoing. This would enable individual agencies to engage in wrong doing without fear of repercussion. Omitting employees from these agencies would also protect the executive branch and directors of the agencies from public scrutiny because national security keeps that information from ever becoming public knowledge. Under these rationales, agencies are able to set their own procedures for whistleblowing internally with little oversight from outsiders. Finally, I will examine a few examples of whistleblowers in the CIA and the outcomes of their actions. Was the information they provided utilized to change the organization or was the employee?s life and career affected? These questions can help us understand whether national security employees are in great danger of reprisal and whether their knowledge about wrongdoing is critical to the public. I will examine two cases of Central Intelligence employees: one who sought to utilize the agency?s internal procedures for whistleblowing and another charged with leaking information outside the agency to the media. These cases, taken from two very different points in history, will illustrate the differences in procedures, but similar outcomes of two CIA whistleblower cases. Richard Barlow was fired in 1989 for reporting to his superiors that Pakistan had built a nuclear bomb, and Mary O. McCarthy was fired in April 2006 after supposed leaks to the media about secret operations. Little of the whistleblowing literature and case studies address the ways in which the public can access whistleblowing complaints and outcomes. I hope my research will contribute to the current debate in Congress for an effective whistleblowing statute to protect intelligence community employees and offer the public some access to critical information about these powerful agencies. http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11247 Title: Material and Structural Enhancements to Spin Transfer Phenomena in Nanopillar Spin-Valve Devices <br/> <br/>Authors: Braganca, Patrick M <br/> <br/>Abstract: This thesis focuses on work performed to fabricate spin valve nanopillar devices with low spin transfer reversal currents suitable for magnetic memory applications. Fabricating nanopillars into small area ellipses with low saturation magnetization ferromagnets is shown to be an effective strategy for reducing reversal currents while maintaining the thermal stability of the nanomagnet. Pulsed current switching experiments performed on devices with a 4.5 nm thick permalloy free layer show switching current amplitudes ranging from 0.4 mA for a 100 ns pulse to 2 mA for a 1 ns pulse. I have also examined the role that micromagnetic effects can play in spin transfer reversal processes. Using micromagnetic simulations, a spatially non-uniform spin current with a component polarized partially out of the plane is shown to enhance the spin-torque efficiency acting upon a reversing nanomagnet. I verified this enhancement experimentally in devices with a tapered nanopillar geometry that generates a spin current polarized partially out of plane. The micromagnetic configurations induced in these tapered nanopillars are also conducive to exciting spin torque driven magnetization oscillations in the absence of an external magnetic field. In addition, by using a small hard axis field the frequencies of oscillations excited in both layers can be tuned such that phase locking occurs between the free and reference layer mediated by spin polarized currents interacting between the layers. This locking phenomenon is character- ized by measured RF voltage signals with large integrated powers and extremely narrow linewidth on the order of 1 HZ. Finally, I have described a fabrication process for patterning a nanopillar struc- ture with a third contact made to any point within a thin-film multilayer stack, providing the means to apply independent electrical biases to two separate parts of the structure. Here, I have demonstrated a joint magnetic spin valve/tunnel junction structure sharing a common free layer nanomagnet contacted by this third electrode. This three-terminal structure provides a strategy for developing spin-torque magnetic random access memory (ST-RAM) cells which avoids the need to apply large voltages across a magnetic tunnel junction during the writing step, while retaining the benefits of a high-impedance magnetic tunnel junction for read-out. <br/> <br/>Description: Robert Buhrman - Thesis Advisor, Dan Ralph - Committee member, Bruce van Dover - Committee member, http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11246 Title: Nanoscale Light Confinement: Principles, Measurement, and Applications <br/> <br/>Authors: Robinson, Jacob <br/> <br/>Abstract: By confining photons to small volumes for long periods of time, optical nanocavities offer the ability to greatly enhance the interaction between light and matter. This can greatly improve the efficiency of photonic devices as well as lead to novel physical phenomena. While over the past several years resonators have improved to confine photons for longer periods of time, the volume in which light can be confined has remained relatively stagnant on the order of a cubic half-wavelength which has been thought to be the fundamental limit. In this dissertation we demonstrate that the effective mode volume of optical resonant cavities can be reduced below a cubic half-wavelength. We develop novel tools to characterize these highly confined optical modes, and utilize this light confinement to achieve efficient light-matter interaction in photonic devices. Finally we present novel physical phenomena which result from this nanoscale light confinement. The dissertation is organized into six chapters. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to photonics and the reasons for pursuing nanoscale light confinement. In Chapter 2 we define the effective mode volume and discuss its theoretical limit. We show with analytical and numerical calculations that contrary to previous assumptions sub-wavelength-sized dielectric structures can enable mode volumes smaller than a cubic half-wavelength. In Chapter 3 we discuss experimental techniques for measuring these ultra-small mode volumes. We introduce a new high-resolution near field measurement technique called Transmission-based Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy (TraNSOM), and show experimental results verifying nanoscale light confinement in our devices. In Chapter 4 we discuss applications for these small-mode-volume devices. We show analytically and numerically that these devices can be surprisingly efficient for achieving gain and lasing in an electrically-pumped silicon-based platform, and we experimentally demonstrate highly sensitive detection of acetylene gas. In Chapter 5 we discuss new physical phenomena associated with small volume optical resonant cavities. We show that these cavities can behave as an individual radiating dipole and, using the TraNSOM technique, the lifetime of this dipole can be modified at long distances. Chapter 6 gives a brief conclusion and outlook on the future of this field. http://hdl.handle.net/1813/11245 Title: Using symmmetries to solve asymmetric problems <br/> <br/>Authors: Gravel, Simon <br/> <br/>Abstract: This dissertation describes two projects in which the treatment of a difficult and asymmetric problem is simplified by using symmetries of basic building blocks of the problem. In the first part of this dissertation we address the problem of determining the effective interaction between ions in metallic systems. Our work applies more generally to systems where effective interactions between massive particles can be calculated to take into account, in an average way, the effect of lighter particles present in the system. We find an equality relating the (asymmetric) effective interaction of two massive particles and the (symmetric) effect of a single massive particle on the density of the light particles. We show how this relation can be used to improve upon the precision of effective potentials calculated by perturbative approaches for an assortment of systems including hydrogen in metallic environment. In the second part of this dissertation we discuss constraint satisfaction problems. We provide multiple examples of constraint satisfaction problems occurring in various scientific areas. In many cases the individual constraints are highly symmetric, while the resulting constraint satisfaction problem is not; there is no symmetry common to all the constraints. We describe divide and concur, a new approach to solve constraint problems, which is based on projections to the individual constraint sets. The definition of efficient projection operators are facilitated by symmetries of the constraint sets. We show that this method is competitive with the state-of-the-art on standard benchmark problems, and in the process establish a number of records in finite disk packing problems. Many applications of the divide and concur approach are still to be explored, and we provide the reader with tools to do so, including promising applications and a list of constraint sets together with efficient projection operators.