NatSec Noir

NatSec Noir is a public reading room for the paperwork of American national-security regulation. We collect the orders, agreements, and watch lists that agencies publish but rarely explain, file them as citable records, and add a short summary in plain language.

What we cover

The file tracks the instruments that decide which companies, technologies, and transactions the U.S. government treats as a security concern. That includes the FCC’s Covered List and its equipment-authorization orders, Team Telecom mitigation agreements and letters of assurance, the Commerce Department’s Entity List and related restricted-party designations, Connected Software Application (ICTS) actions, Section 1260H listings, and the litigation that tests all of it.

How a record is built

Every record points back to a primary source — an agency order, a filed agreement, an official list. We store a copy, note the docket, the issuing body, the document date, and the day it entered the file, and write a summary that states what the document does without editorializing. The summary is the editor’s; the document is the authority. Each record carries a citation you can copy.

Why it exists

These records are public, but they are scattered across dockets, PDFs, and press releases that assume you already know the vocabulary. Journalists, compliance teams, researchers, and the companies on these lists all end up re-doing the same retrieval. NatSec Noir does it once, in the open, and keeps it current.

A note on authority

Records here are public documents. Summaries are the editor’s reading of them. Nothing on this site is legal advice — which, if you work in this field, you already knew. When accuracy matters, cite the source document, not the summary.

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