Thursday, January 09, 2003

Information that has no relationship whatsoever with security issues is vanishing


SearchDay - Vanishing Act: The U.S. Government's Disappearing Data - 19 December 2002
More than any other country, the U.S. government has used the web to make a wealth of information available to its citizens. But as we are now discovering, the dark side of web-based information is the ease with which it can be deleted.

Government-sponsored (which is to say, taxpayer-funded) information and research is disappearing from government web sites, much of it in the name of national security. Airport safety data vanished, and chemical plant risk-management plans were deleted from the Environmental Protection Administration's web site.

The Department of Energy removed environmental impact statements which alerted local communities to potential dangers from nearby nuclear energy plants, as well as information on the transportation of hazardous materials.

The US Geological Service asked depository libraries to destroy a CD-ROM database on surface water (as a result, University of Michigan researchers lost access to information vital to their three-year study of hazardous waste facilities, and community activists could no longer access data on chemical plants that violate pollution laws).

An entire database of unclassified technical reports was removed from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Web site since it would have taken too much time to examine each document in the database for its potential security risk.

The Defense Department removed over 6,000 documents from its web site. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission shut down its entire web site and brought it back up again, scrubbed of anything considered potentially useful to terrorists.

According to the American Library Association, the Department of Energy has removed 9,000 scientific research papers that contain keywords such as "nuclear" or "chemical" and "storage" from national laboratory web sites and is reviewing them to see if they pose security risks. The Defense Technical Information Center has removed thousands of documents.

But other information that has no relationship whatsoever with security issues is also vanishing, and there is some suspicion that an ideology test is being applied. The Centers for Disease Control removed reports from its web site on the effectiveness of condoms in AIDS prevention, and on effective programs for the prevention of tobacco use, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among young people.

The National Cancer Institute removed a report debunking the claim that abortions increase the risk of breast cancer, and the Department of Education is, it says, "reevaluating" hundreds of research reports available on its web site.…
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1219-vanish.html

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