[Reader-list] The US government is pulling back on previously....

[Jaswinder Singh Kohli]

>From LA TImes
Rising Fears That What We Do Know Can Hurt Us
 Information:  shared data to keep it from aiding terrorists.

WASHINGTON -- The document seemed innocuous enough: a survey of
government data on reservoirs and dams on CD-ROM. But then came last
month's federal directive to U.S. libraries: "Destroy the report."

So a Syracuse University library clerk broke the disc into pieces,
saving a single shard to prove that the deed was done.

The unusual order from the Government Printing Office reflects one of
the hidden casualties of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks: the public's
shrinking access to information that many once took for granted.

Want to find out whether there are any hazardous waste sites near the
local day-care center? What safety controls are in place at nuclear
power plants? Or how many people are incarcerated in terrorist-related
probes?

Since Sept. 11, it has become much harder to get such information from
the federal government, a growing number of states and public libraries
as heightened concern about national security has often trumped the
public's "right to know:"

* At least 15 federal agencies have yanked potentially sensitive
information off the Internet, or removed Web sites altogether, for fear
that terrorists could exploit the government data. The excised material
ranges from information on chemical reactors and risk-management
programs to airport data and mapping of oil pipelines.

* Several states have followed the federal government's lead.
California, for example, has removed information on dams and aqueducts,
state officials said.

* Members of the public who want to use reading rooms at federal
agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service must now make an
appointment and be escorted by an employee to ensure that information is
not misused.

* The Government Printing Office has begun ordering about 1,300
libraries nationwide that serve as federal depositories to destroy
government records that federal agencies say could be too sensitive for
public consumption.

* Federal agencies are imposing a stricter standard in reviewing
hundreds of thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests from the
public each year; officials no longer have to show that disclosure would
cause "substantial harm" before rejecting a request. Watchdog groups say
they have already started to see rejections of requests that likely
would have been granted before.

The trend reverses a decades-long shift toward greater public access to
information, even highly sensitive documents such as the Pentagon Papers
or unconventional manifestos such as "The Anarchist's Cookbook," a
compilation of recipes for making bombs. The popularity of the Internet
has made sensitive information even easier to come by in recent years,
but the events of Sept. 11 are now fueling a new debate in Washington:
How much do Americans need to know?

Attacks Place Internet Content in New Light

The swinging of the pendulum away from open records, supporters of the
trend say, is a necessary safeguard against terrorists who could use
sensitive public information to attack airports, water treatment plants,
nuclear reactors and more.

In an Oct. 12 memo announcing the new Freedom of Information Act
policies, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said that, while "a well-informed
citizenry" is essential to government accountability, national security
should be a priority.

"The tragic events of Sept. 11 have compelled us to carefully review all
of the information we make available to the public over the Internet in
a new light," Elaine Stanley, an Environmental Protection Agency
official, told a House subcommittee earlier this month.

But academicians, public interest groups, media representatives and
others warn of an overreaction.

"Do you pull all the Rand McNally atlases from the libraries? I mean,
how far do you go?" asked Julia Wallace, head of the government
publications library at the University of Minnesota.

"I'm certainly worried by what I've seen," said Gary Bass, executive
director of OMB Watch, a nonprofit group in Washington that monitors the
Office of Management and Budget and advocates greater access to
government data on environmental and other issues.

"In an open society such as ours, you always run the risk that someone
is going to use information in a bad way," Bass said. "You have to take
every step to minimize those risks without undermining our democratic
principles. You can't just shut down the flow of information."

It's a fine line acknowledged by Stanley. "[The] EPA is aware that we
need a balance between protecting sensitive information in the interest
of national security and maintaining access to the information that
citizens can use to protect their health and the environment in their
communities."

The Sept. 11 hijackers, using readily accessible tools like box cutters,
the Internet and Boeing flight manuals, hatched a plot too brazen for
many to fathom. It forced authorities to consider whether a range of
public sites and sensitive facilities was much more vulnerable than they
had realized--and whether public records could provide a playbook for
targeting them.

Officials acknowledge that there are very few examples of terrorists
actually using public records to glean sensitive information, but they
say that the terrorist attacks prove the need for extraordinary caution.

The first directive by the Government Printing Office, made last month
at the request of the U.S. Geological Survey, ordered libraries to
destroy a water resources guide. While documents have been pulled before
because they contained mistakes or were outdated, this was the first
time in memory that documents were destroyed because of security
concerns, said Francis Buckley, superintendent of documents for the
printing office.

Because the water survey was published and owned by the U.S. Geological
Survey, the libraries that participate in the depository program said
they had little choice but to comply. Some librarians asked if they
could simply pull the CD from shelves and put it in a secure place, but
federal officials told them it had to be destroyed.

"I hate to do it," said Christine Gladish, government information
librarian at Cal State Los Angeles, which has pulled the water survey
from its collection and is preparing to destroy it. "Libraries don't
like to censor information. Freedom of information is a professional
tenet."

Peter Graham, university librarian at Syracuse University, said:
"Destruction seems to be the least desirable option to me. . . . We're
all waiting for the other shoe to drop. Are we going to see a lot more
withdrawals [of documents]? That's my fear."

In fact, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing publications
that it has made available through the Government Printing Office,
Buckley said, and it is almost certain to ask for the destruction of
some of its titles.

Some have resisted the push to limit access, even on such nerve-rattling
subjects as anthrax.

The American Society for Microbiology's Web site--an extensive
collection of research articles, news releases and expert
testimony--includes information about antibiotic-resistant anthrax.
After anthrax-laced letters contaminated the nation's mail system,
members of the society debated whether a determined individual could
find and misuse the information on its site.

"We . . . decided not to remove it," said Dr. Ronald Atlas,
president-elect of the scientific organization. "The principle right now
is one of openness in science. . . . If someone wants to publish [a
legitimate research paper], we're not going to be the censor."

But that position has drawn scorn from some of Atlas' colleagues.

"We have to get away from the ethos that knowledge is good, knowledge
should be publicly available, that information will liberate us," said
University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "Information will
kill us in the techno-terrorist age, and I think it's nuts to put that
stuff on Web sites."

The debate about sensitive information is not a new one. A quarter of a
century ago, Princeton University undergraduate John Phillips pointed
out the dangers of nuclear weapons when he was able to use publicly
available sources to design a crude but functional nuclear bomb.

Phillips, who now heads a political consulting firm in Washington, said
in a recent interview that cutting off the flow of information after
Sept. 11 is merely a "cosmetic" change when what is really needed are
better means of securing access to nuclear and chemical facilities and
supplies.

Members of the public will be the ones to suffer, he said. "Restricting
information may make us feel good, but terrorists aren't dumb. They'll
still be able to get at this information somehow."

In the past, it has taken a tragedy to buck the trend toward more and
greater public access. That's what happened in California in 1989 after
actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot to death at her Los Angeles home by
an obsessed fan who used publicly available motor vehicle records to
find out where she lived. The state quickly cut off public access to
such records.

Indeed, chemical and water industry groups are lobbying the Bush
administration to curtail regulations providing public access to the
operations of public facilities, data that environmentalists say are
critical to ensuring safety.

And nongovernment entities such as the Federation of American Scientists
have begun curtailing information.

Group Clears Pages From its Web Site

The group recently pulled 200 pages from its Web site with information
on nuclear storage facilities and other government sites. For a group
known for promoting open information, it was "an awkward decision,"
concedes Steven Aftergood, director of the federation's government
secrecy project.

"But Sept. 11 involved attacks on buildings, and we realized some of the
information we had up [on the Web] seemed unnecessarily detailed,
including floor plans and certain photographs that didn't seem to add
much to public policy debate and conceivably could introduce some new
vulnerabilities," he said.

"Everyone is now groping toward a new equilibrium," Aftergood said.
"TherX-Mozilla-Status: 0009ing pressures that cannot easily be
reconciled. The critics of disclosure are saying that we are exposing
our vulnerabilities to terrorists. The proponents of disclosure say that
it's only by identifying our vulnerabilities that we have any hope of
correcting them. I suspect that both things are true."

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Regards
Jaswinder Singh Kohli
jskohli at fig.org
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The Uni(multi)verse is a figment of its own imagination.
In truth time is but an illusion of 3D frequency grid programs.