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

oh no

[X0563511]

The commies are coming!

It's Joseph McCarthy all over again...

Re:oh no

[DNS-and-BIND]

To be fair, McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

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?!

Re:oh no

[LateArthurDent]

To be fair, McCarthy was right. There really were Communists in the State Department.

Even if that's true, it doesn't make McCarthy right. In this country, the government isn't allowed to prosecute people for their political beliefs. The problem with McCarthy wasn't just that there was a witch hunt in place. The problem was that if every single person he accused to be a communist was indeed a communist, the proper response is, "so what?"

Re:oh no

[the gnat]

If McCarthy was right it was entirely by accident. Many innocent people were smeared as Communists simply for advocating policies that McCarthy personally disagreed with. Among the many was George Marshall, the man responsible for the Marshall Plan and thus one of the people most responsible for saving Western Europe from a Communist takeover. The character of the McCarthy-like senator in "The Manchurian Candidate" is uncomfortably close to the truth.

Re:oh no

[Linux Torvalds]

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.

Re:oh no

[Rufty]

If they transfer valuable secrets, prosecute them for that, and if they didn't then leave their political beliefs out of it.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, I myself have seen the horrors and bloodshed of Capitalism up close and personal in the United States of Amerika.

On another note, I have been screwed a lot more by Big Business than by Big Government.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, Ayn Rand saw the horrors and bloodshed of Communism up close and personal in Russia.

Yes and she left for a better place where her speech would not be suppressed ... how sad that she eventually forgot such notions and then suppressed the speech of those who opposed her ... of course, she was all about hypocrisy as she didn't appear to be above utilizing social programs ...

Once the oppressed now the oppressor ...

Re:oh no

[PlastikMissle]

Bullshit right back at you. Sure you won't win, but the government doesn't prosecute you if you run as a third party candidate.

Re:oh no

[LateArthurDent]

When your political beliefs include the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, that's where the line is drawn. The 50s Communists believed exactly that. They weren't being persecuted for their political beliefs, they were being persecuted for the fact that they wanted to do the federal government what the Tea Party wants to do today. Do you agree with the Tea Party?

I don't agree with the Communists, and I don't agree with the Tea Party. I don't want to prevent either of them from being in positions in government, however. Other than by not voting for them, that is. If other people vote them in, that's their right, because I do believe in a representative government.

The line, by the way, isn't whether your political beliefs include violent overthrow of the U.S. government. It's when your actions support that. The moment you take up arms and try to force the government out and put your own government in place, I expect you to be shot down and arrested. I'm not going to support the government going after you for pre- or thought-crime, though.

Re:oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism

No. The vast majority of the victims of McCarthyism were not transferring secrets to the USSR and being homosexual certainly doesn't make people into communist sympathizers.

Re:oh no

[Attila Dimedici]

That wasn't Joseph McCarthy, that was the Democrats on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, or don't they teach that part in school? When Ayn Rand testified before HUAC, Joseph McCarthy was in the Senate. The HUAC was controlled by Democrats when Joseph McCarthy was making a name for himself.

Re:oh no

[abirdman]

Ms. Rand would have had a better time of it in the USA if she hadn't insisted on writing children's books. Eventually her audience grew up. Oh wait, a few stayed back.

Re:oh no

[abirdman]

Are you referring to the right Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Because Rev. Wright is an honorable, articulate, educated, honest, and forthright man, who is at least second generation military, served as a Marine and a Navy corpsman, has more academic degrees than most Tea-Baggers have fingers on their right hand, is a college professor and runs a church. The fact that the fucktard-right-- errr, I mean mainstream media-- in this country can't tell the difference between an intelligent man's hyperbole (used to illustrate a point about the history of racial oppression) and violent insurrection-- does not condemn the man.

And if not Rev. Wright, then who are you talking about?

Re:oh no

[jamstar7]

Damn, no mod points.

The 'trade' I was trained for all those decades ago that would 'set me up for life' was obsolete in 10 years. Retraining? Not available, unless you were a displaced auto worker.

Re:oh no

[cusco]

No, her family left Russia because her class no longer could suppress the free speech (and pretty much every other right) of the commoners.

lol

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, whoever governments probably all have a complete copy. The only ones this is gonna hurt is ourselves.

Re:lol

[hardie]

This is usually referred to as closing the barn door after the horse gets out.

Maybe some other country will post the reports so we can have access to them.

Fighting a smarter enemy

[game kid]

"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.

Barn Door

[fermion]

Would not the first thing one would do, if interesting in these technical reports, is to download them all. I have done such things in the past with documents sets I wanted to review. Taking them offline does not make all the copies already generated disappear.

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.

Maybe we can ask the chinese to put a mirror up?

[leehwtsohg]

I mean, we could ask really nicely, no?

Hey, china, how about it? In the name of humanity? Openness?

Brilliant

[joe_frisch]

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????

"There doesn't appear to be a third-party mirror"

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:There it is AGAIN!

[Trepidity]

The (Party-State) thing is pretty common for both parties, especially when talking about someone less known. If I were writing about Dick Cheney or Barack Obama or something, I wouldn't put it there, but if we're talking about regular Congresscritters, it seems like useful information to know their party affiliation and where they come from.

If you're seeing a pattern, perhaps rather than a conspiracy, it's simply that one party is attacking science more than the other one is, at least lately?

Re:shitty

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:Context

[Trepidity]

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.

Keep out the good guys

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Mirror

[zmooc]

So.. anybody in China reading this kind enough to put up a mirror?

Re:Context

[idontgno]

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.

Re:Right by accident

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

NASA Tech reports and export controls

[cyberfringe]

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.