Slashdot Mirror
White House Threatens Veto Over EPA "Secret Science" Bills
sciencehabit writes The U.S. House of Representatives could vote as early as this week to approve two controversial, Republican-backed bills that would change how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses science and scientific advice to inform its policies. Many Democrats, scientific organizations, and environmental groups are pushing back, calling the bills thinly veiled attempts to weaken future regulations and favor industry. White House advisers announced that they will recommend that President Barack Obama veto the bills if they reach his desk in their current form.
In this article from 2009 our-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin, researchers were able to identify %87 of Americans with just 3 piece of information: zip code, birthdate and sex. With the mountains of personal data both publicly accessible and in private databases and with what are essentially clearing-houses especially designed to aggregate this data, identifying people in anonymized data is almost trivial unless that data is so heavily sanitized as to be useless to research and in effect fail the "reproducible" requirement of the law.
The obvious target is to tie up all EPA regulations until courts have confirmed the reproducibility of the data used to base the decision on. It will fall to the EPA to prove their data is reproducible by someone who wishes to not reproduce it. Everything else would be illegal.
The language of the bill is very clear. It is intended to do what it says: make sure our regulatory bodies (employees of The People) are making their decisions based on publicly available, sound science.
Why should they be able to keep their "science" secret, as they have? That's obviously a non-starter. Especially when they're attempting to shove the most expensive regulations in history off on the public.
From the full article, the law as written, would bar the EPA from using any studies involving confidential patient information unless they were made public.
This is really reaching, by anybody's standards. I read the article, and Morganstein's letter.
The language of the bill calls for "publicly available science". It does not say that the subjects of any studies cannot be kept confidential. That's just malarkey.
As I wrote above: such studies or surveys, by their very nature, are presumed to be repeatable. The idea is that anyone else who conducted such a study, with a similar but separate sample of individuals, would come up with the same results. After all: that's what the studies are for.
To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't anywhere say that study subjects cannot be anonymous. The only thing that can't be anonymous or secret are the authors and their methodologies.
I don't mind honest debate about the issue, but the idea that the statement "publicly available" could reasonably apply to study subjects is a pretty long and thin stretch of the imagination.
"Good" is a subjective term. I think that we may have different expectations of informed voters come next year. If there's a strong turnout at the voting booth, the GOP is doomed in their race for the White House. And they keep digging that hole deeper.
Thing is, the population overall is becoming progressively smarter. Thanks to social networks, it's easy now to see that people who consistently support the GOP are also the ones to make bigoted statements, assertions easily proven false with less than five minutes of reading, and who throw temper tantrums when they're disagreed with. Stupid is loud, and the Internet has given it a megaphone so it can show just how loud it is.
So, that base of informed voters is growing while the uninformed mass the GOP relies upon is shrinking. Their most loyal constituents are post-retirement, *possibly* pre-senility. Only *possibly*. On top of that, recent voter turn out means almost nothing. Democrats and moderates seldom show up for midterm voting, but the race for the White House isn't exactly something that happens quietly like midterms often do.
I'm optimistic. I think that if the GOP just keeps digging that hole deeper at such a vulnerable time, then America will show them just how stupid that is. And I think that after they lose 2016, their party will be forced to reevaluate its strategy. The only question is whether they'll manage to rig enough electronic voting booths that none of this will matter and whether they'll destroy the evidence quickly enough again.