Libraries Asked To Destroy Reports, Databases

unix guy writes: "Our good friends and protectors in the U.S. Gov't have decided that what we used to know we can't know any longer. This LA Times story talks about libraries being ordered to destroy existing government reports and data sources in the name of homeland security." Is it really a fair trade to give up readily-available information about "airports, water treatment plants, nuclear reactors and more"?

Comments

This is absurd.

[trilucid]

If the damned terrorists want to know all about our nation's infrastructure, the information is readily available in A LOT OF PLACES, not all under government control. The ways of getting at such data are simply innumerable.

This is wrong, and yes, I'm going to mention 1984 here. How much closer do we have to get? The government is, in effect if not by intent, enforcing the concept of revisionist history. I don't pretend to understand how to deal with our current problems (here in the U.S.), but this isn't the way.

Maybe it's time to really step up efforts to archive data in places out of the reach of such efforts. Data warehousing might be what saves us in the future from this sort of insanity. Yes, it would have to have significant funding to work, but that funding could come from anywhere, anonymously if necessary. I for one would contribute.

Of course, even given that, the government would no doubt make accessible such digital troves illegal at some point, potentially classifying the very action of such access as "terrorist in nature".

Nobody is going to tell me I can't access public domain information and knowledge. No matter what, people will find a way. Sorry about the rambling here, this just pisses me off.

Web hosting by geeks, for geeks. Now starting at $4/month (USD)!
Yes, this is my protest to the sig char limit :).

Re:This is absurd.

[Hobaird]

We have always been at war with Afghanistan. We have always been allies with Russia.

Sad...

[bluephone]

The free and legal exchange of information we need as citizens is slowly being eroded by pinheads in Washington. What scares me more and more is that this information is being taken from us NOT by people we elected, but people who were appointed, and I don't just mean Tom Ridge. For a moment I was glad that my state no longer had him as Governor, then I realized how much more damage he can do at a national level.

Tom Ridge also has a history of denying information to his citizens. As the former governor of PA, he made it illegal to have cellular phone programming information if you were not directly related to a cellular company, whether a seller of phones, repair shop, etc. The Black Crawling Systems BBS archives formerly for sale by l0pht could not be sent to PA because of my wonderful unconstitutional legislature and governor. I fear what else Tom Ridge will try to take away.

Re:Why bother.

[uchian]

Umm... In my opinion that is the wrong way of looking at it.

Think about it. These documents are, in effect, a way of saying "security weakness". By making the documents closed, we are promoting security through obscurity, which has been proved time and time again not to work.

Perhaps instead we should be concentrating more on how to secure those places which the documents, well..., document. We've already seen from September 11th that terrorists and the like are capable of incredible ingenuity, and we must not forget that they are capable of doing their own research - just because we consider them to be mad, doesn't mean that they are stupid.

Or to put it another way, burning all of the documents that happen to detail airplane security and it's weaknesses will not stop hijackers from taking a plane. ACTING on those documents and improving security will.

What was the example in the article - a cd containing a dam and resevoir survey? So why not consider the ways that the water system can be attacked, and then safe-guard against these kind of attacks?

Is scientific information next?

[mj6798]

Many of the books on the shelves at libraries are probably much more "dangerous" than those government reports. Standard textbooks and research papers contain information about how to create dangerous chemicals and organisms, how to protect yourself during laboratory work, and how such dangerous chemicals and organisms can be dispersed. Of course, those textbooks don't talk about terrorism or warfare, they talk about agriculture, organic chemistry, and molecular biology.

At the end of this path is a society in which a few, carefully screened individuals have all the knowledge and the rest of the population lives in ignorance. In fact, throughout history, we have had societies like that. The "knowledge elite", of course, derives lots of power and wealth from their knowledge and soon dispenses with the need to consider input from the masses, who don't know what's going on anyway.

It is up to us in a democratic society to decide how far we want to go down that path. At least we still have the choice for now--once we are too far down that path, democracy inevitably disappears, since you can't make informed political decisions if you don't have information.

Spooky

[T.Hobbes]

This quote says it all:

"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 here is between the idea there is and that there is not a net benefit in having an open society, where individuals by virtue of citizenship have access to whatever information they want so long as it doesn't post an immediate and vital security threat. Once you start censoring papers and publications because they can fathomably be used to hurt the government, you limit the public's ability of oversight in public health, security, and spending. No longer can public-interest groups review and recommend changes to public works and such. You also reduce accountability of the government to the people and the press: if the plans on public works are state secrets, graft and corruption become much easier and less dangerous. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, because this style of censorship does not have a clear standard of justification - a 'clear & present danger', say - the issue of a slippery slope comes into play. There is, I suppose, one fundamental questions to be asked: first, is the realistic danger of the censorship greater than the realistic danger of the information being censored?

Re:Good grief... calm down

[Lumpy]

carelessly deployed?

I'm sorry but information on how to design a water filtration plant should be public knowlege and should be a required class for high school kids. Designs and research on civil engineering projects is a vital and valuable resource to engineers, scientists, and the members of the public that have brains that are consisted of something other than jello.

The only way to breed the geniuses for the next decade is to give them complete access to how things were done and accomplished. Yes studying the plans for the Hoover Dam will teach a student far better than point to a picture and this is a dam, it holds back water... mmmm kay?

Our society is content with breeding morons and holds contempt against anyone that has an interest or knowlege above the "norm"

Yes, I know how a nuclear bomb works, but there is no way in hell anyone with just the raw materials can build one. and any of these over-hyped "terrorists" could never accomplish it.

All they were able to do was crash a few planes, devastating as it was, it's not rocket science.

Yes I demand access to all that science has to offer. I demand access to microbiological research. and I demand access to chemical research... I demand access to engineering and civil design research.

and sadly, being a scientist (anyone interested in science is a scientist so bug off phd weenies) I'll probably be among the first targetted by my own government in the name of security.

The thing is...

[Chasing Amy]

The thing is, the terrorists already have all the documents they need. When we raided Saddam's nuclear program during the Gulf "conflict" (not much of a war, really, and no formal declaration then as now, which I find stupid), we found declassified documents gotten from the U.S. government printing office for a modest fee, from the early days of our nuclear program. We also found them being put into practice--we found 1940s era (in terms of the tech) cyclotrons being used to make fissionable uranium. We hadn't thought this possible before because the technology can only produce minuscule quantities of the right uranium isotope, so we wrote it off as impractical and declassified the design schemtics and all for the cyclotrons we'd tried with in the early days. Turns out Saddam was more patient than we are.

Such documents have been available for years. Terrorists already have them. They are already on the Internet. Closing the barn door after the horse is gone is needless. We just need to keep from declassifying anything else that ought not to be. Problem is, the three-letter agencies never want to declassify anything, and that would be even worse than declassifying dangerous infrastructure or nuclear information. I don't want terrorists attacking my country. But if my country becomes any more backwards and secretive than the Star Chamber it's already fast becoming, then I wouldn't mind so much if the whole thing gets destroyed and we have to start from the fundamentals again. I believe it was Jefferson who advocated periodic revolutions, to remove the "cruft" that accrues around any government.

In two centuries, we've gone from isolationist "paradise" happy to revel in our beautiful countrysides and stay out of world conflicts for our own good, to the Roman Empire of the modern world. I'm not one of these assholes who whines about how America deserves what it gets--certainly innocent people just going about their daily lives don't deserve to die--but frankly I'm not surprised nor dismayed, either. I don't really like my government. It did worse things than pulling easy-to-get-elsewhere data from libraries, even before Sept. 11. While I lament the deaths of the innocent, part of me hopes our government keeps baring its true fangs until everyone sees what it is and gets fed up with the cruft and corruption. Our government taxes us to death to do worthless things like give 2 BILLION dollars of aid ech year to Egypt, which hates us, hundreds of millions each year to Afghanistan, whose government sponsored terrorism against us, and BILLIONS to several other countries which almost all Americans couldn't care less about. Why should it be the responsibility of a teacher making near-poverty wages to subsidize third-world regimes? That's practically communism. After all, "to share everything and be poor together is madness." Why do we do it? The stock answer, political stability. The real answer, to subsidize regimes that are favorable to U.S. corporate interests, so that people who would cut off U.S. trade don't get into power.

That's what it's all about in the end. Take from the average working class citizen to subsidize corporations, corporations which get tax breaks to "stimulate the economy" (read: get companies to make more stuff and get people to buy more stuff, whether the stuff is necessary or not). The rest of the world objects to so much American stuff floating around and destabilizing their own native industries--and I can't blame them for that; I can sympathize since corporate America's stuff also destabilizes native industries here in America (average citizens can't compete with the Wal-Marts; we all become employees whereas in the old days many, many more of us would be owners, and could work towards being owners). In turn America is hated and attacked, though unfortunately foreign terrorists don't want to make the distinction between American citizens and the government which lords it over them. In turn the government acts even more repressive. The question is if and when we will reach the breaking point, where pressure leads to a breakdown in the economic and social structure. I have to say, I hope so. It would give us a chance we won't have otherwise to return to the core fundamentals of the Constitution, shedding all the strained and bogus interpretations and omissions which have been imposed in the intervening years--such as the fact that the Tenth Amendment is entirely ignored.

There are so many parallels between the U.S. and the Roman Empire--our history and development run along the same lines. Agrarian Republic to world-shaking Empire. True Republic to puppet government controlled almost exclusively by the elites. A country which avoids warfare once it consolidats itself and expands to its natural boundaries, to an Empire which thrives on warfare to promote economic interests.

This has digressed from the small topic of restricting information to the larger issues which have spawned such restriction. But it is undoubtedly an action which is a thread in this larger tapestry. We really ought to examine proactively the reasons behind our government's actions, rather than reacting to them one by one. This is the problem the media has--they promote dwelling on the small issues, while ignoring the bigger picture because it won't fit into a 90-second segment. We really need to examine these themes when incidents arise, instead of treating each as if it existed in a vacuum.

Re:The thing is...

[Chasing Amy]

I think our government has become unsound because of two things: the reliance on money and power for becoming a viable candidate to the legislative and executive branches, and the detachment of the judicial branch from the actual letter and intent of the Constitution.

As for the first, it is more or less self-evident. We've had several different political parties come and go over the course of our history--the idea that we are a two-party system and better for it is a relatively new and completely untrue one. In any given geographical area, there were always several parties--groups of people interested in politics who wished to back and promote a candidate who agrees with their ideals. Some of these were directly affiliated with national parties which were the most prominent, such as Democrats or Whigs or later Republicans. While they therefore had an advantage thanks to networking and name recognition and improved fundraising, politics was essentially still local. Local parties had almost equal power to field candidates and get them recognized within a given district. And, an individual with a great reputation and local name recognition could build up his own group of supporters--essentially his own local party--and do damn well.

This is no longer true thanks to the fact that the national party structure is able to raise so much money for paid media advertising, that the national parties have raised the bar for entry of third-party or independant candidates ridiculously high, and that media outlets like television--which is now sadly the only way most people get information--only give coverage to the candidates from the Big Two parties in most cases, being motivated to save their costly airtime, and seldom cover third-party or independant candidates with equal vigor.

The current Big Two parties have secured through legislation their ability to get candidates on the ballot automatically, while anyone else has to work very, very hard to get his name there. In the old days, everyone had to work at the same level. Why give such preferences to an organization simply because it happens to be dominant at a particular time? If the Democrats and the Whigs had done the same thing back when they were the two most prominent parties, well, the Whigs would still be around and the Republicans would never have had a chance to rise to the same level.

Because of this artificial prominence, almost all the money goes to these two parties, since most people believe in the two-party mythos and believe--rightly since the playing field has become so tilted--that very few third-party or independent candidates can win. Such huge warchests and powerful backing and lobbying have been amassed behind the Republicans and Democrats, that few others can compete--television is now the primary medium, and it costs a lot of money to buy a little bit of airtime. Money is therefore primary to getting a candidate elected, whereas originally it was a minor consideration since most campaigning was done in person by stumping and through local newspaper coverage. Now, local newspapers are the things nobody reads that are given away at the grocery store and elsewhere; almost everyone reads their nearest big-city paper instead, which is usually more of a regional or national paper in which local issues aren't the most important, and so local candidates not backed by a major party are given little or no shrift. And nobody really stumps, since they can get more coverage by buying airtime and ads, and doing the occasional speech instead of hurriedly going around the election district trying to explain your beliefs to everyone in person. TV is just so much more effective, and so much more expensive...

The result is entrenched parties which will always be in power thanks to their artificial advantages. Would the Founders believe that two parties with great prominence at a pearticular time should be able to pass legislation to make getting elected harder for everyone else and easier for them? No. To make it worse, as Noam Chomsky points out throughout his writings and videos (though I don't take him seriously on many other things), the Big Two really aren't at all far apart in philosophy. They're both for Big Government and extreme federalism, just to different ends and in different areas. They seem different to the average person, because each party is for or against certain things like abortion--but at the core, they both agree on the same sort of system, the same sort of political philosophy; they only disagree on details, not on major structures. The result is that voters usually get to choose between two sides of the same coin. Where's the party that, for example, wants to reduce federal government to only those things explicitly authorized and reasonably implied by the constitution? Plenty of people want that--yet the artificial obstacles prevent such people from banding together and having any reasonable chance of fielding candidates.

As for the judicial branch, I think it went awry when it started interpreting the Constitution instead of just reading it as literally as possible. Today there is no dispute about whether we should interpret the Constitution or not--there are just "strict constructionists" who try to interpret it narrowly and "loose constructionists" who try to interpret it broadly. Why not just read the damn thing instead? If the Constition says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."--that's pretty self-explanatory. Congress shouldn't pass any laws regarding religions or churches whatsoever; it can pass no laws which restrict speech or writing; it can pass no law to prevent people from peacefully assembling. What's there to interpret? The Court should just decide what laws do and do not violate this; no interpretation is necessary. Interpretations are used for justifications of decisions, but unfortunately under our system they then become precedent and have the force of law themselves. So, don't interpret at all. Explain why a law violates or does not violate, but don't add or remove meanings by making grand pronouncements about what you think the Constitution means. It's written in plain language after all, and for good reason.

An example of what goes wrong when the judiciary interprets instead of simply reading the Constitution word for word is the mess about what the 2nd Amendment "means," hinging around interpretation of the word "militia". "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Why does this need interpretation? Militia had a very simple meaning at the time--any able-bodied man over the age of majority and under a certain age, who was therefore eligible to serve in a military capacity. But that doesn't matter anyway, because just reading the sentence, any English major can tell you that that sentence is equivalent in meaning to this one, which is easier for modern readers to parse since they no longer teach us so well about subordinate clauses and such: "Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Again, unless you are a moron you understand this sentence. It needs no interpretation. It is entirely self-evident. If you believe in gun control, fine--pass a Constitutional amendment to add restrictions; just don't try to read things you want to see into words which are so simple and straightforward. I should add that we can keep convicted felons from owning firearms, though, because felons do not have and never had full rights unless they are restored by legislative action, which is why we can keep them from voting, owning firearms, etc.

This is the cause of much of our legal cruft--people want to interpret the Constitution and the laws to suit their own desires, even when it obviously contradicts them. What they should do is campaign for those changes, not try to twist the Constitution and laws through interpretation to fit those changes. It demeans and diminishes the letter and spirit of those documents, and makes it progressively easier for everyone else to twist and tweak them to fit into their own ideologies and wishes--especially since we have a system of precedent. The Founders wrote the Constitution in very simple language--excruciatingly simple for the day, when flowery embellishments were the norm. It's simple to understand. People need to stop trying to make it conform to their own beliefs. Campaign to change it if you don't agree with it--just don't reduce it to meaninglessness because you want to interpret it to allow your opinions rather than what it clearly says.

Because of this judicial love of interpreting things to avoid the obvious, we've lost the last bastion of our rights. For example, the legislation passed recently to allow law enforcement agencies to read anyone's Net traffic headers without a warrant is blatantly contrary to the Fourth Amendment's admonishment that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You have to have a particular reason to look at anything which would otherwise be private, and you have to have a warrant which specifies exactly what you can look at. Pretty simple. But the Court can and will interpret these words however it wants, instead of just reading them literally and if need be asking the simple question WWTJD--What Would Thomas Jefferson Do? After all, he wrote those words. If they seem at all ambiguous--which they don't really--simply honestly thinking about what Jefferson and others directly involved meant by them is the only valid method of clarification. They were amazing people, a generation of thinkers and doers who threw off the bonds of subjugation and created a new and thriving, trend-setting nation. They wrote the Constitution as plainly and unambiguously as they could, to avoid the need for interpreting it.

And the Bill of Rights was an afterthought which many of them thought was unnecessary since such rights were so obvious at the time. It was a time when people and state governments were put ahead of the federal government. It was a time when national government was expected to conduct foreign policy, regulate interstate commerce and interstate disputes, and to otherwise leave us all alone. It was a time when the Ninth and Tenth Amendments still meant something: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We had the full rights and protections of the Common Law. The federal government was there to assist the people and the states, not to extend its regulations into every facet of our lives.

Now our rights are not so obvious--at least to those full of interpretations and agendas, and to the majority of people who just don't know our proud history and heritage. Anyone who's read the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and Washington's journal, Franklin's papers, etc., knows that they would be appalled at our current system. Again, they were brilliant men, and created a system which still functions better than could be expected even after 200 years of cruft weigh it down and pervert it. There is no single government in the world which has operated for so long without very fundamental changes to its structure. (Before someone mentions England, it changed fundamentally at the beginning of the 20th century, when the House of Lords was finally rendered impotent.)

What I'd like to see is a return to this core. The Constitution should be enforced, not interpreted. The federal government should leave domestic law enforcement (except where it crosses state or national boundaries) and any other function not dealing with what the Constitution explicitly delagates to them, except for a few useful things not enumerated like printing the national currency, to the states. Most of our tax money could be spent at the state level, instead of having a national government dominated by pork barrel politics which loses big chunks of our money while filtering it back down to the states. Why not just have that money go directly to the states through state taxes? Why not have the federal government leave us alone, and just worry about protecting the people and their rights, as the Constitution charges it? Our federal tax dollars should be spent on defense and national infrastructure, not on foreign aid to bolster corporate sales penetration into foreign markets and on tax breaks to whatever interests got the President elected. Big political parties should be given no preferential treatment over small ones--they all need to jump through the same hoops to get on the ballot. Basically, I'd like to see a return to the federal government we had in 1805, with changes, additions, and subtractions only where obviously needed thanks to the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It would be a small, lean, efficient government. It wouldn't need to hide things from the people. It wouldn't need to promote corporate interests. You wouldn't need to be in the pocket of a big corporate interest just to viably enter it.

But this will never, ever happen without outright revolution. Politicians would never willingly give up their corporate perks. Politicians are not visionary enough to look to the Constitution rather than their petty opinions. Politicians don't want to give up the powers they have which are not enumerated by the Constitution, since most things would become the province of state governments again rather than the national government--for example, abortion would be up to the States to decide individually, since the Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to regulate such things except where they become interstate issues. Unless a state violates a Constitutional right of its people, or an issue involves national defense or foreign policy, the federal government would largely let the state governments and the people who elect them decide what to do.

What I see is a large bureaucratic government that has taken the place of the nimble and responsive government we once had. What I see is a government which seeks to monitor its people, without reason, without probable cause, without warrant. What I see is a government which killed Randy Weaver's family because he advocated gun ownership rights and was therefore branded suspect--and which does similar things all the time albeit with much less publicity. What I see is a government which wants to keep everything about itself secret, even to the point of not letting the public know if toxic nuclear waste is being stored near them. What I see is a government which is owned by corporations, and more directly beholden to them and their money than to the people themselves.

I've gone on and on far too long; everyone gets the point. But right now, I don't see the cruft being removed without a real Jeffersonian revolution. It's time to collect all the information and all the arms while it's still legal to do so, because at some point both may be outlawed just when they're most necessary. I love my country, and I love its history. But I want a real government of the people, by the people, for the people, to take the place once more of our current government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. I want accountability where there is none. And I know I'm not alone.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:nothing new here

[1010011010]

I suppose it's okay for 5,000 people to die so some asshole like you can have access to information you don't need.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Re:nothing new here

[jacoplane]

This might sound very inhumane, but it's something I feel needs to be said.

Compare the number of deaths each year due to car-accidents and due to terrorism. Now look at the actions being taken to stop them from happening. Liberties are being grabbed away right, left and center, all in the name of stopping terrorism.

Don't you think this is exactly what terrorists aimed for? They want americans to feel scared.

And the worst thing is that I don't think it will help much at all. There will be more terrorist attacks in the future: raising security will not stop this: it will serve primarily to terrorise americans further.

Re:nothing new here

[zenyu]

I suppose it's okay for 5,000 people to die so some asshole like you can have access to information you don't need.

Ok, I'll throw my hat into the insensitive ring too.

Of course it is! Do you have any idea how many of us have died to procure that very right? If we were talkin 500 million I'd listen to the arguement, but hell we already gave up most of our freedom because the idea of losing 5,000 million in a day is pretty damn frightening.

I thought we were on the path to eliminating at least the most ill concieved of those like the confiscation of property on a guilty until proven innocent basis. The Supreme Court even had a case saying you couldn't keep people locked up forever in INS jails before the 11th.. Now we've already adopted KGB tactics and people are actually talking about moving on to Nazi police tactics on PBS. I'd expect that from talk radio, but it's the policy makers who're on PBS.

And all this over just 5,000 people?

I think it's mostly just the bruised pride of the empire we're dealing with in these 'you unpatriotic asshole' type posts.

I don't think you really give a damn about those 5,000. I had two dozen friends in that building, none of whom were for this kind of idiotic descent into book burning. And the only Bush voter who got out is still against it. (All but 2 got out.)

As a New Yorker I really loath this power grab by the Nixonian cronies in the White House. Meanwhile the congress tells New York to screew itself when it is looking at a 200 Billion dollar hit, with only 21 coming from Congress (If all the promises are kept, congress wants to reduce it to less than 10 Billion, that PR allocation earlier being just a little to brash.) The vacancy rate is UP! in downtown NYC despite the fact that more than 1 million square feet were taken off the market that day. I have very strong friends who are taking psychoactive drugs for the first time because they just can't handle seeing their friends in a huge unmarked grave every day. I started smoking that day.

But reading the news just gets worse and worse each day, I hold little hope that congress will ever get the sense and the balls to oppose our president and the likes of you.

New York is a city that values democracy, those 5,000 would not want to live in the world Herr Bush asks for. I have my doubts whether Bush really wants to either.