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)."

Comments

shitty

[Pi Is A Rational]

well, that's shitty.

There it is AGAIN!

[DNS-and-BIND]

There's the party affiliation right in the story! It's an (R) again. Whenever a (D) does something reprehensible, the party affiliation is omitted. Is this a rule or something?

It's always "both parties are equally bad, there is no difference between them" until the offender is identified as an (R), when the narrative about-faces in pure "we have always been at war with Eurasia" fashion to "those (R)s are uniquely horrid".

What are the bosses trying to do with these tactics? Divide and conquer? Perhaps we should all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Context

[TubeSteak]

This is all in the context of a Chinese national who was arrested at the airport,
on his way to China, with NASA materials he wasn't supposed to have.

This isn't some random act of political pressure.
The reality is that NASA is trying to get its house in order.