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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)."
The commies are coming!
It's Joseph McCarthy all over again...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, whoever governments probably all have a complete copy. The only ones this is gonna hurt is ourselves.
"Export control", just like DRM, deprives good citizens from the ideas of their own peers, while still allowing malicious types with connections and know-how to have the controlled ideas anyway.
Both forms of idea control fight a smarter enemy...by making non-enemies even dumber.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
No doubt the Chinese have that covered.
Just more security theater, move along.
I wonder how much money has been wasted discussing this, making it happen, and how much money will be wasted reviewing the documents. I am glad sequestration hasn't done anything to impair congresses ability to waste money.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I mean, we could ask really nicely, no?
Hey, china, how about it? In the name of humanity? Openness?
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
from the American natives.
The reports were on line so we can assume the Chinese have already downloaded all of them. Now we take them offline so that US businesses can't take advantage of the technical data that they contain.
Then we will add a likely complex and expensive process of vetting the reports which will delay any future releases - except for organizations that are good enough to hack the NASA computers and download them immediately.
Whose side are WE on????
Of course there is - it's in Beijing. We just don't have access to it, nor do we have access to the original anymore.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"When guns are criminalized, only 3D printer owners will potentially have colorful guns."
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If China or any country wanted to study this information they would have already downloaded and saved this stuff. It would have taken them 5 minutes. The information is already in every countries' hands and there is nothing that can be done about it.
NASA's still moving? Quick find something to drain its budget!
How many millions of dollars will have to be spent on this "export control review"?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
What's wrong with the observation "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"? If China already had it, they wouldn't have a spy trying to carry it back to their country.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It doesn't really, but funding does. I hear whining here about politicians passing laws on the internet and computers when they clearly don't understand it, the same is problematic for science. I've heard suggestions that the cancelled superconducting super collider would have been completed had the US government not insisted on funding it exclusively to spite the Soviets. That was in a museum of scientific instruments in France though, so that may have been slightly anti-american. I dunno, I was one at the time it was started and ten at the time it was killed.
Either way, politicians always have and probably always will use science to their own ends without regard for actual progress, and it's harder to claim ownership of something you don't own if someone else has contributed equally to it.
NASA also just announced that they're cutting a bunch of other stuff thanks to the sequester. A whole lot of US scientists won't be attending international space conferences this year.
well, that's shitty.
Pfft. Just mix in some of the bills in the US House every few pages and the Chinese government will become so encumbered and gridlocked they won't know if they are coming or going.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Horse, Barn, Door Open.. No Horse.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I don't see how taking down an archive of publicly available documents, many of which have been publicly available for decades, is reasonably related to someone stealing documents that aren't publicly available.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Much of the kind of information on NTRS (the recent stuff that would be a valid export control concern, not the historic archive--which while useful seems to be a much less reasonable concern--"OMG the durn commies might find out about Republic's failed proposal for the X-15") is also available in published journals, or in multiple independent online archives/cache's...just NTRS provides easy access without a paywall and at one place.
Of course the end result is that those of us who are funded by NASA and find NTRS useful in are day jobs end up spending three times as long to find the information we need (guess it's time to renew those AIAA, AAS, IEEE journal subscriptionsor go to a technical library). BUT, if the Chinese accidentally delete their copy of NASA TN D-683 and all their backups, now we'll force them to walk to a librarythat's sure to slow down their rocket program.
I have no doubt that in an archive that size/scope, there might of been somethings that slipped through, but everything I've had published over the years has had to go through an export review process before it would even be accepted for NTRS.
This is just stupid.
All that stuff was only "science".
My father worked at NASA for 30 years. He was involved in guidance and navigation. Worked on the IU on the Saturn V.
In the '90s, he told me the only thing classified at NASA was the vehicle destruct system details. Don't want someone intentionally blowing up a manned rocket on its proper course. He said that they were denied access to classified gyroscope materials from the spy satellite and ICBM world. Other secrets may have fallen under "trade secret" status as NASA contracted the building of most things.
However, just the other day I downloaded information about the F-1 rocket engine. At one time the documents I downloaded were classified. I guess they didn't want the Soviets to learn more about our tech.
Then the DART mission occurred. Within the report, there was information that might make it easier for bad actors (terrorists/states) to use GPS navigation for munitions. That information is restricted as is some more recent information.
So.. anybody in China reading this kind enough to put up a mirror?
0x or or snor perron?!
In a bizzare twist today China announce it would begin archiving & mirroring *all* Public Domain materials. US Citizens appauded the move as it meant they might finally be read about the results of the research their tax dollars paid for. /sigh
Does the phrase "absurd knee-jerk overreaction" ring a bell?
The panic spasms of a bureaucracy discovering they've facilitated espionage are so powerful you could probably do pinch-confinement fusion in their rectums.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The bureaucracy didn't come up with this idea of their own accord, unless by "the bureaucracy" you mean the U.S. Congress rather than NASA. The chairman of the Congressional committee that oversees NASA's funding explicitly and very specifically demanded that they take down this archive. And they gave in, and did so.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
"What the fuck were the congressmen thinking?"
Evidence for Red-baiting to smear Obama.
"What the fuck was NASA thinking when it complied?"
These idiots are in control of the future of our entire space program and get their panties all twisted because of something stupid and trivial, but if we anger them they may start cutting billions out of spite.
The lack of third party hosting probably implies nobody cared to begin with BUT possibly the Chinese... who we're supposed to have a good relationship with so they can keep making my nikeys.
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.
I have direct experience with submitting a number of my technical reports to the NASA Technical Report Archive, a requirement for reports of research sponsored by NASA. The submittal process included a third party assessment of the applicable technology export control laws. In my case, this was performed by our Office of General Counsel. However, I was also asked whether controlled information was included in the report or not under the assumption that it was my responsibility to know the rules. While I believe I was personally scrupulous, I will wager that many report authors saw the whole process as a poor use of their time and were not so careful. So I believe the archive probably does contain export controlled information. On the other hand, the really interesting work gets published in the relevant journals and professional society conferences, and there is no way to control that except through the classification process.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Since when is a demand by a mere member of Congress a reason to withold information from the taxpayers? Shouldn't this be put into law or at least made official somehow?
You're talking apples and oranges.
Classified technologies must be kept secret from everyone not authorized to see them, regardless of their nationality.
In the U.S., export-controlled technologies are technologies that may be freely distributed to anyone in the country -- and indeed, to anyone in most countries -- but not to members of certain "lists." One of the lists is for entities, and includes, "China." Such technologies may be even discussed in public forums -- stadiums, even -- as long as one is assured that no one from the restricted lists is present. Note that one does not have to physically export anything to be in violation of these laws -- discussing the wrong technology with the wrong foreign national is all that is required.
I'm not an expert in this field, but I seem to remember an exception to the rules in that anything intended for publication is permitted to be exported. That's how technical journals continued to exist. Strange, I know.
Instead of looking at this as a way to stop a leak of non-exportable information, the purpose of a review is to determine what has already been leaked, and therefore, what's no longer really a secret.
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
which is why Hoover cut him off and worked with the president to shut down his hearings.
meanwhile the guy who wrote High Noon was chased out of the country, as was the guy who wrote Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as was t he guy who wrote Threepenny Opera,
With the exception of medics and the like, it doesn't really matter how you are assaulting the enemy.
Move sig!
First, the Republicans were the people (google "Lincoln") who, being whacko religious nutjobs who drag morals into politics, ended slavery (which was legal, but immoral) ... even though doing so required an actual war against the southern Democrats (Historical FACT: No Republican was a slave owner).
Second, Historical FACT: the Democrats and independents who formed the KKK used to call for the deaths not only of blacks but also of Jews and Catholics and Republicans (disagree? spend more time at the national archives and lose your ignorance)
Third, The Republicans (a minority in congress at the time) helped LBJ push the civil rights legislation through because LBJ could not get enough of his fellow Democrats to support it. This, too, is well-documented historical fact, rather then blogger drivel.
Please explain how you get to the bizarre narrative that black-hating-southern-Democrats (who still DESPISED Lincoln and many of whom still call the Civil War "the war of Northern Aggression") abandon the Democrat party (which mostly opposed the civil rights law) and flock to the Republican party (which pushed the law through) in response to... that very civil rights law. Um..... I'll bet your school teacher (almost certainly a member of one of the nation's two giant teachers' unions... both very deeply in-bed with the Democratic party) told you this tale and knew that you, as a kid who was both uninterested and insufficiently bold, would not ask any questions that would expose the obvious lie in this "party line". It was NOT the civil rights bill that drove so many from the south into the arms of the GOP (which they'd been raised to HATE) it was many of the other social matters of the sixties (the sexual stuff, the drugs, the anti-military and anti-establishment stuff). These are, not surprisingly, the VERY SAME ISSUES that keep the south in with the GOP now. There is plenty of evidence for this... you can just take their word for it, or you can actually notice that they flock to support and elect those black Republicans who choose to throw their hat into the ring. It's also telling that it is the Democrats in the media who make all the savage attacks on any black Republican who rises in politics or right-leaning media (Democrats are fine with the blacks they control and who stay on the political plantation).
While we're on history and McCarthy, please note that not only did the DEMOCRATS control the House Unamerican Activites Committee, but the committee itself never "blacklisted" ANYBODY in Hollywood; No law was passed to ban Communists from acting or writing in Hollywood. Powerful people in Hollywood fell all over each-other in a panic over the idea that the public would find out some of them were Communists and they worried that the box office sales would fall and they'd all lose MONEY... so the people in Hollywood blacklisted their own people. Movie people who wanted to keep raking-in the cash, so they threw their friends under the bus and kept-on making money for themselves without looking back. There were principled guys like Kirk Douglas who while not being a Communist himself, refused to go-along and led to some "blacklisted" people being able to work. The most disgusting thing is that for decades, left-leaning people in Hollywood lied about the "black list" and instead of saying "we never should have put our bank accounts above our peers" they pretended to have "clean hands" and principles and they ranted and raved against Joe McCarthy and against Hollywood people like Elia Kazan (who had answered Congressional questions as all Americans had previously and traditionally done when called to speak to congressional inquiries). During the Oscars immediately following the death of the famous director, when he came up on screen during their "in memoriam" segment, the lemmings of Hollywood all sat on their dirty hands and with false self-righteousness denied him the customary gentle applause. Their false piety and the victim-of-persecution-by-proxy attitute they espouse gets no sympathy from me because I know the history
Surely you've heard of the southern strategy? It's not exactly a fringe theory.
[posting as A/C because I already modded in this thread]
As NASA will never be given the budget to perform the reviews.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Once, long ago, there was this supersonic transcontinental aircraft named Concorde.
Then, after years and years of use, for various good reasons it was halted, and same good reasons explained there wouldn't be other civilian supersonics anymore. (but most of us were considering PROGRESS was continueing, weren't us?)
By the last years of Concorde, I graduated a space engineer in Europe.
At that time, when there was a flaw in one of the european spacecrafts or launchers, a commission was created but its results first were hidden for months, and then when published they were so much toned down it was almost ridiculous.
At that time, the immediate comparison, with reverence, was the US: so wealthy a country that any space crash there was immediately detailed, published, openly criticized and you *knew* the next issue would solve it.
Thit, was a time where there was the US, and then the others.
That the US now perform as ridiculously as their lousy followers twenty five years ago, is very telling.
Telling about the end of a civilisation. Face it. We are all Concorde-ed...
Herve S.
I just learned about this when I went looking for a report, CR-2357, Peter Glaser et. al.'s "Feasibility study of a satellite solar power station" from 1974 . I've downloaded hundreds of NASA reports as part of my research, but not all of them. There are millions of pages of documents there; to review them to ITAR requirements would take everyone working at the agency years to do.
Sorry I'm late to the party, but I've been busy actually putting this government research to work, creating jobs and healing the environment. With this one heinous act, the politicians (R and D, it took both) just flushed a trillion dollars worth of scientific and technical research down the crapper, and possibly the survival of the U.S. You can bet that the (Name of Current Enemy Here) have already downloaded every one of those reports; all that the Feds have done is deny access to Americans. The really sad thing is that most Americans are such ignorant partisan illiterates that this modern "burning of the library of Alexandria" went unnoticed, perhaps was even applauded when the politicians reported their security triumph to the fools (R and D both) who elected them.
Any one of those reports, no matter how trivial, is more important to our future than the whole pack of politicians in DC. Let's ITAR house.gov, senate.gov, and whitehouse.gov instead, those maniacs are more dangerous than a nuclear arsenal.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com