Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Qualms about publishing data that could be used to plot terror attacks have prompted a leading official-secrecy foe to scrub its Web site -- joining a trend well under way among U.S. government agencies.
October 11, 2001
Secrecy Foe Joins U.S. Move to Scrub Data on Web
By Jim WolfThe Federation of American Scientists, a staunch advocate of government openness, said Thursday it had yanked about 200 of its estimated half-million Web pages since Sept. 11 terror attacks killed some 5,500 people in the United States.
The federation's site, www.fas.org, contains one of the Web's biggest archives of national security-related material, including detailed rundowns on U.S. weapons systems, spy satellites and nuclear plants.
"It's a peculiar situation," said Steven Aftergood, director of the group's Project on Government Secrecy. "We're not in the business of concealing government information. We're in the business of publishing government information."
The federation -- a research and advocacy group that counts 50 or so Nobel laureates among its 3,000 members and sponsors -- was trying to do the responsible thing, Aftergood said.
U.S. government departments and agencies, meanwhile, have stripped a wide range of documents from Web sites because of perceived threats to such critical systems as pipelines, water supply stations and power plants.
The Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics, for instance, has cut off public access to databases used for mapping because of stepped-up concern about U.S. transportation infrastructure.
"At this time, we are only providing geospatial data to federal, state, and local government officials," said a notice on the bureau's Web site, www.bts.gov/gis/.
At the Defense Department, the armed forces and specialized agencies "probably are reviewing material (on their Web sites) as we speak," said Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood. "Everything is sort of a little different than before Sept. 11."
The Environmental Protection Agency has dismantled its risk management Web site, which contains general information about emergency plans and chemicals used at 15,000 sites nationwide.
ONE OF BIGGEST ARCHIVES
In taking down a small part of its archive, the Federation of American Scientists said it had acted entirely on its own initiative, not in response to any official prodding.
"There's all the difference in the world between those two things," said Aftergood, publisher of a newsletter that regularly blasts what he considers excessive government secrecy.
Some of the pages ditched, Aftergood said, showed "locations and layout" of U.S. intelligence facilities such as those presumably being used in the ongoing U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan against the network and hosts of Osama bin Laden, suspected mastermind of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Also scrubbed were "operational characteristics" of U.S. weapons platforms such as Navy warships and "loading and unloading procedures" of certain ships, he said.
"From my point of view, we are exercising our freedom of the press -- which includes both the freedom to publish and not to publish," Aftergood said in a telephone interview. He said he expected most of the information to be restored to the site eventually along with new material being added daily.
In many cases, data pulled together by the federation and by a handful of other public policy groups is so widely scattered in the public domain as to be practically inaccessible even though it is unclassified.
John Pike, a former Federation of American Scientists policy analyst who left to start GlobalSecurity.org -- a defense, space and intelligence policy group -- scoffed at the idea of scrubbing any information from the public domain.
"The Soviets tried that during the period of (Cold War) stagnation and it bankrupted their society," he said. "There were no phone books in Moscow. There were no street maps. None of the buildings had signs on them. And it destroyed their society."
OMB Watch, a Washington-based group that promotes government accountability, criticized the trend toward removing material from the public record.
Limiting the free flow of information is "how totalitarian societies operate," said Gary Bass, the group's executive director. "While security may improve, the spirit of civil society is lost. We cannot let that happen here."
Copyright 2001 Reuters