Slashdot Mirror
Political Pressure Pushes NASA Technical Reports Offline
Trepidity writes "The extensive NASA Technical Report Archive was just taken offline, following pressure from members of U.S. Congress, worried that Chinese researchers could be reading the reports. U.S. Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) demanded that 'NASA should immediately take down all publicly available technical data sources until all documents that have not been subjected to export control review have received such a review,' and NASA appears to have complied. Although all reports are in the public domain, there doesn't appear to be a third-party mirror available (some university libraries do have subsets on microfiche)."
To be fair, McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.
To be fair, he tried to identify Communists in all walks of life and ran through Hollywood suppressing freedom of speech and using strong arm tactics to destroy the rights of non-state department citizens. Under Joseph McCarthy, Ayn Rand testified in front of congress against film makers to have them fined and jailed. How fucked up is that? He made it illegal to be a Communist no matter how nonviolent or extreme you were. It was the definition of witch hunt and suppressed freedom of speech in American media. It's fine to ferret them out of the State Department but why the private sectors?!
I don't think "so what?" quite covers the possibility of treason by State Department employees.
Well, "so what?" seems to covers the reality of treason in the Oval Office, so I don't see why the State Department should be held to tighter standards.
Actually, not an accident. IIRC the man who gave McCarthy his list was (unknown to McCarthy) KGB. Everybody on that list was deemed either expendable (to make it seem more legitimate) or someone they wanted marginalized (like Marshall). It also served to distract people from the agents they had in place in the CIA and DOD by de-legitamizing any real investigations.
I have heard it said that the one thing the KGB was very good at was spreading dissent. McCarthy served that aim very, very well.