FC: Stimson Center demands gvt censorship of chemical-data websites

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[This is from Steven Aftergood's Secrecy News, published by the
Federation of American Scientists and available here: 
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html Amy Smithson's bio is here 
(alas, it lacks an email address for her): 
http://www.stimson.org/stimson/smithson.htm I invite her or the center to 
reply. --Declan]

---

SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
November 13, 2001


**      STIMSON CENTER:  CENSOR ENVIRO WEB SITES
**      POGO TO DOE:  WITHDRAW SENSITIVE DOCUMENTS
**      CROUCH TO GARWIN:  SHUT UP


STIMSON CENTER: CENSOR ENVIRO WEB SITES

In a startling plea for official censorship, Amy E. Smithson of the
Henry L. Stimson Center last week urged the government to "close down"
web sites run by environmental organizations if they publish information
about hazardous materials in local communities around the country since
such information could be used by terrorists.

"In this day and age, Washington can no longer afford to hand any
interested individual a road map to the chemical calamities they could
cause with the toxic materials located in communities nationwide,"
Smithson testified at a House Transportation subcommittee hearing last
week on "Right to Know After September 11th."  The hearing examined the
policies governing public disclosure of chemical hazards at various
industrial facilities.

In particular, Smithson said, the government must clamp down on those
environmental organizations that have published information on hazardous
material inventories and accident consequences, including information
that has now been withdrawn from government web sites.

"Immediately, these interest groups must cease and desist activities
that make data on hazardous materials facilities available to widespread
public view, removing this data from their websites," she said.

"Failing their voluntary cooperation, the US government should take
swift steps to close down the pertinent segments of these organizations'
websites and take legal steps to prohibit them from distributing this
data in the future on the Internet or by other means," Smithson
instructed.

Dr. Smithson has been widely quoted for her expertise and opinions
concerning chemical and biological weapons policy.  The Henry L. Stimson
Center is a mainstream policy research and advocacy organization whose
declared motto is "Practical steps to ideal solutions."  But the new
censorship proposal hardly fits that description.

Smithson's testimony on this point invited disbelief because she
blithely made several assumptions that are questionable or simply
incorrect, including: (a) there is no countervailing benefit to the
independent publication of information about hazardous materials; (b) it
is possible for the government to effectively suppress information that
has been privately published on the web; and (c) it would be legally and
constitutionally permissible to attempt to do so.

An opposing view was presented at the hearing by environmentalist
Jeremiah Baumann of the advocacy organization US PIRG.

"The right to know is a proven tool for increasing public safety," he
argued.  "Choosing restrictions on the public's right to know about
hazards in communities, rather than actually reducing those hazards, can
hurt safety rather than help it."

Speaking pragmatically, Elaine Stanley of the Environmental Protection
Agency outlined the four criteria the EPA has developed for deciding
what to publish and what to remove from the Agency's web site.

All of the prepared testimony from the November 8 hearing on Right to
Know After September 11th may be found here:

http://www.house.gov/transportation/water/11-08-01/11-08-01memo.html


POGO TO DOE:  WITHDRAW SENSITIVE DOCUMENTS

In something of a man-bites-dog story, a public interest group has
called upon a government agency to remove certain information from the
agency's web site.

The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) said it was "irresponsible"
for the Department of Energy to publish "detailed maps and descriptions"
of various nuclear weapons facilities on the web.

"Though POGO has worked tirelessly to promote public access to
government information, in this instance we feel that access to this
information serves no public good," said Danielle Brian, POGO's
Executive Director.

Last week, the DOE removed the most sensitive of the cited documents,
POGO said.

See "Energy pulls sensitive nuclear information from the Web" by Joshua
Dean in Government Executive:

     http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1101/111201j1.htm


CROUCH TO GARWIN: SHUT UP

As evidenced above, the debate over when public information becomes a
threat is being enacted with increasing urgency since September 11 with
no clear resolution in sight.

Recently, physicist and problem solver extraordinaire Richard L. Garwin
authored an article in the New York Review of Books (11/01/01) on "The
Many Threats of Terror," sketching out the potential scope of terrorism
as a step towards identifying appropriate means of protection:

     http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14661

For his trouble, he earned a scolding from jazz critic and essayist
Stanley Crouch, who suggested that Garwin had carelessly provided a
roadmap for future terrorists.

"It seems disgustingly remarkable that those enemies within our borders,
when brainstorming in search of the best ways to murder as many
civilians as possible, need only turn to ... articles like Garwin's to
replenish their strategies of mass assassination," Mr. Crouch wrote in a
letter to the editor of the New York Review (11/29/01, not currently
online).

This is a harsh judgment, and there is no evidence that public
discussion of potential threats has contributed to terrorism.  But it is
not unreasonable to worry that it could.

At the same time, it seems probable that most of the weaknesses that
terrorists could hypothetically exploit will never be corrected if they
cannot be publicly identified.

The basic dilemma was stated by Richard Garwin in his published reply to
Stanley Crouch's complaint:

"If [Mr. Crouch] could find some way to solve such problems without
alerting people to their existence," Garwin wrote, "I would certainly
prefer that approach.  But he is asking the impossible."




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