ICSTI: Re: Report on London Online - Removal of items from the Web
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- Subject: ICSTI: Re: Report on London Online - Removal of items from the Web
- From: Pete Strickland <ps@iucr.org>
- Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 14:47:05 GMT
---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Re: Report on London Online - Removal of items from the Web Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 08:33:41 -0500 From: "Molholm, Kurt" <KMolholm@DTIC.MIL> To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL Colleagues regarding the Didaspearing Data artcle included in Barry's email I can only speak for DTIC. Here's the story. The cited article states "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 ALA, the Department of Energy has removed 9,000 scientific research papers from national labs that contain keywords such as "nuclear" or "chemical" and "storage" and is reviewing them to see if they pose security risks. The Defense Technical Information Center has removed thousands of documents." First of all the Defense Technical Information Center and the Defense Department actions were the same action. Last January, after the New York Times published an article ststing you could buy germ warfare manuals from DTIC (YOU CAN'T)I and a colleague from the Office of the Secretary of Defense met with a staff member of the National Security Council and a staff member of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (both office of the Executive Office of the President). Most oif the documents cited in the New York Tmes article were old, some over 40 years old and had been in the publlic domain for years. What was decided,and applied to othe Federal Government organizations (including the Department of Energy) was to search our bibliographic files for documents that may now have again become sensitive, immediately remove the citations and any online full-text documents and make amore indethe analysis. Department of Energy did this by using some broad terms. The Department of Defense (namely DTIC) pulled in some technical area apecialiste in nuclear, chemical, biological, etc. and refined our serch strategy. The result was we pulled 6600 citations form our public online bibliography file so that DoD specialists could review the full document in depth. Some of the citation also included full-text documents. These were also removed. The plan was, and still is, to return most of the docum,ents to the public files. DTIC still has over a million citations to publicly available reports in our on line facility. As you can see the 6600 documents temporarily removed (except for a small number) is a veryt small percentage of our collection. I hope this clarrifies. Kurt -----Original Message----- From: Barry Mahon [mailto:mahons1@EIRCOM.NET] Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 4:42 AM To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL Subject: Report on London Online - Removal of items from the Web Hello All, Just back from Online London, nice to see some of your there amd apologies if I missed others. In particular I missed Bonnie Lawlor the new Executive Director of NFAIS, good luck to her in her new post. My general impression was that the show and conference had "reverted to form" following a number of years where we had a wide range of exhibitors and speakers from areas alongside the information sector. This year there was the "usual suspects" and a few others, resulting in a more focussed affair. I attended several sessions but the most interesting was that on scholarly publication, which, as Sally Morris said 'didn't contain anything new' (from the viewpoint of thos already familiar with the topic) but did cover all the ground and showed that there is no doubt that there is fundamental change underway. However, it is my view we will have a number of methodologies of scientific information dissemination operating in parallel in the future, some paid for, some free. On my return I found this item in my in-tray - it refers to items removed from US govt web sites in the interests of security. Since a number of ICSTI Member Organisations are mentioned I reproduce it here in full: DISAPPEARING DATA by Marylaine Block More than any other country, our government has made a wealth of information available to citizens on the web. But 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. Chemical plant risk-management plans and airport safety data vanished from the Environmental Protection Administration's web site. The Department of Energy removed environmental impact statements alerting local communities to potential dangers from nearby nuclear energy plants, as well as and information on the transportation of hazardous materials. The US Geological Service asked depository libraries to destroy a CD-ROM database on surface water (and 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). A database of unclassified technical reports has been removed from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Web site. 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 ALA, the Department of Energy has removed 9,000 scientific research papers from national labs that contain keywords such as "nuclear" or "chemical" and "storage" 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. Health and Human Services removed a research report that debunks the claim that abortions increase the likelihood of developing breast cancer, and the Department of Education is, it says, "reevaluating" hundreds of research reports available on its web site. Furthermore, state governments are also removing data from public access. Florida governor Jeb Bush signed measures closing public access to information on hospital security plans and information on emergency stockpiles of pharmaceuticals. Florida lawmakers have also proposed restricting access to information about cropdusters and about state investigations of food-borne illnesses. Massachusetts legislators want to restrict access to records such as blueprints for the state's bridges, tunnels and airports. Michigan and Tennessee legislators are considering barring access to state emergency response plans. In Oklahoma, among the sensitive materials legislators are considering restricting are the times of school board meetings and the location of high pressure gas lines. Now, it is possible to make an honorable case for all of these deletions of public information. Maps revealing the location of gas pipelines might very well be useful to terrorists, though it would be even more useful to potential buyers of farm land crossed by those pipelines. Information on safety flaws at chemical plants might indeed be useful to terrorists, but it would be even more useful to emergency workers in nearby communities. Educational and medical research are always in need of updating, but then again, the traditional way of doing it is to add new data rather than to erase the old. The problem is that the previous presumption that publicly-funded information should be available to the public has been replaced by the presumption that government gets to decide whether people should have the information or not. Gary Bass, of OMB Watch, a private group which monitors government spending and legislation, says "We are moving from a right to know to a need to know society." Where former Freedom of Information Act policy put the burden on the federal agencies to justify withholding documents requested under FOIA, Attorney General John Ashcroft's October 12, 2001 memo to federal agencies instructed them to avoid releasing documents until after conducting a full review of any possible security implications of the disclosure. Isn't that convenient for government, given that the natural tendency for government officials is toward secrecy? And if you don't believe that, see the Audits and Surveys of State Freedom of Information laws <http://foi.missouri.edu/openrecseries.html>, which reports on the project by a number of news agencies to request public information from a variety of agencies in 19 states; they were repeatedly forbidden access -- in Colorado, a third of the time local agencies failed to comply with state public records law, in Connecticut only 22% of agencies complied, in Maryland requesters had only "a one-in-four chance of immediately getting what they are looking for." September 11 has become a blanket excuse for governments to conduct their business as they prefer to do -- in private, suppressing all kinds of information, whether or not is has even the most tangential relation to national security, and without any regard to valid public information needs. Timothy Maier reports, in a story in the April 8 Insight Magazine, that "even résumés of senior government officials are being censored in some agencies... When reporter Todd Carter obtained resumes of EPA political appointees to post on the Natural Resources News Service Website <http://www.publicedcenter.org>, the EPA directed him not to post them because of privacy concerns. The EPA then sent another batch of résumés that blacked out education levels, awards, affiliations and even job experience. When asked for the return of the unredacted résumés, Carter refused and posted résumés on the news-service Website showing that EPA had brought in former Enron employees" <http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/229694.html>. More information will presumably disappear when some government agencies cease to exist as their functions are folded into the new Department of Homeland Security. Among the agencies slated for extinction are the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. Will anybody in the reconstituted agency preserve those documents? If not, I hope that the University of North Texas librarians who operate a "CyberCemetery" of the documents of defunct government agencies <http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/> will preserve these pages as well What's more, not only is there no government policy stipulating procedures and determinants for the deletion of data from government web sites, no government agency, not even FirstGov.gov, can even tell you what has been deleted from what pages. So who is keeping track of deleted data? As you would expect, government document librarians are monitoring the situation closely; information on deletions and other threats to public information is available on the Government Documents Round Table web site <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/GODORT/>. GODORT has also created a Task Force on Permanent Public Access to Government Information <http://tigger.uic.edu/~tfontno/publicaccessindex.html>. Other concerned groups include OMBWatch <http://ombwatch.org/>, which monitors the deletion of government web pages, and the Federation of American Scientists, which maintains a Project on Government Secrecy <http://www.fas.org/sgp/>. The Project's director, Steven Aftergood, suggests that what we need is an oversight panel to review deletion decisions so that decisions to withhold public information could not be made "by some anonymous agency official" without the possibility for the public to challenge them." It seems to me that GODORT is on the right track with its task force for permanent access to government documents, and there are plenty of willing organizations it can partner with, but the job is too big for them. There are just too many web documents to copy, and thanks to OMB's dictum that federal agencies should ignore the Government Printing Office, even finding them will be a major challenge. Librarians -- not just government documents librarians, but all of us -- are going to need to assume that information on government web pages will disappear. Just as librarians have worked cooperatively to make sure that last copies of printed works are not allowed to vanish, we will need to act cooperatively, and quickly, to preserve information temporarily stored on government web pages. Because it's not THEIR information, and we can't let them get away with deleting it. We paid for it, and we need it, if we're to have any hope of knowing what our government is doing. It's OUR information. Since giving people access to the information their taxes paid for has always been our job, librarians are the ones who are going to have to take on this challenge. ------------------------------------------------------- -- Best wishes Peter Strickland Managing Editor IUCr Journals ---------------------------------------------------------------------- IUCr Editorial Office, 5 Abbey Square, Chester CH1 2HU, England Phone: 44 1244 342878 Fax: 44 1244 314888 Email: ps@iucr.org Ftp: ftp.iucr.org WWW: http://journals.iucr.org/ NEWSFLASH: Complete text of all IUCr journals back to 1948 now online! Visit Crystallography Journals Online for more detailsTitle: RE: Report on London Online - Removal of items from the Web
Colleagues regarding the Didaspearing Data artcle included in Barry's email I can only speak for DTIC. Here's the story. The cited article states "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 ALA, the Department of Energy has removed 9,000 scientific research papers from national labs that contain keywords such as "nuclear" or "chemical" and "storage" and is reviewing them to see if they pose security risks.
The Defense Technical Information Center has removed thousands of
documents."
First of all the Defense Technical Information Center and the Defense Department actions were the same action. Last January, after the New York Times published an article ststing you could buy germ warfare manuals from DTIC (YOU CAN'T)I and a colleague from the Office of the Secretary of Defense met with a staff member of the National Security Council and a staff member of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (both office of the Executive Office of the President). Most oif the documents cited in the New York Tmes article were old, some over 40 years old and had been in the publlic domain for years. What was decided,and applied to othe Federal Government organizations (including the Department of Energy) was to search our bibliographic files for documents that may now have again become sensitive, immediately remove the citations and any online full-text documents and make amore indethe analysis. Department of Energy did this by using some broad terms. The Department of Defense (namely DTIC) pulled in some technical area apecialiste in nuclear, chemical, biological, etc. and refined our serch strategy. The result was we pulled 6600 citations form our public online bibliography file so that DoD specialists could review the full document in depth. Some of the citation also included full-text documents. These were also removed. The plan was, and still is, to return most of the docum,ents to the public files. DTIC still has over a million citations to publicly available reports in our on line facility. As you can see the 6600 documents temporarily removed (except for a small number) is a veryt small percentage of our collection.
I hope this clarrifies.
Kurt
-----Original Message-----
From: Barry Mahon [mailto:mahons1@EIRCOM.NET]
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 4:42 AM
To: ICSTI-L@DTIC.MIL
Subject: Report on London Online - Removal of items from the Web
Hello All,
Just back from Online London, nice to see some of your there amd apologies if I
missed others. In particular I missed Bonnie Lawlor the new Executive Director of
NFAIS, good luck to her in her new post.
My general impression was that the show and conference had "reverted to form"
following a number of years where we had a wide range of exhibitors and
speakers from areas alongside the information sector. This year there was the
"usual suspects" and a few others, resulting in a more focussed affair.
I attended several sessions but the most interesting was that on scholarly
publication, which, as Sally Morris said 'didn't contain anything new' (from the
viewpoint of thos already familiar with the topic) but did cover all the ground and
showed that there is no doubt that there is fundamental change underway.
However, it is my view we will have a number of methodologies of scientific
information dissemination operating in parallel in the future, some paid for, some
free.
On my return I found this item in my in-tray - it refers to items removed from US
govt web sites in the interests of security. Since a number of ICSTI Member
Organisations are mentioned I reproduce it here in full:
DISAPPEARING DATA
by Marylaine Block
More than any other country, our government has made a wealth of information
available to citizens on the web. But 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.
Chemical plant risk-management plans and airport safety data vanished from the
Environmental Protection Administration's web site. The Department of Energy
removed environmental impact statements alerting local communities to potential
dangers from nearby nuclear energy plants, as well as and information on the
transportation of hazardous materials.
The US Geological Service asked depository libraries to destroy a CD-ROM
database on surface water (and 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). A database of unclassified technical reports
has been removed from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Web site.
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 ALA, the Department of Energy has removed 9,000 scientific
research papers from national labs that contain keywords such as "nuclear" or
"chemical" and "storage" 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. Health and Human
Services removed a research report that debunks the claim that abortions
increase the likelihood of developing breast cancer, and the Department of
Education is, it says, "reevaluating" hundreds of research reports available on its
web site.
Furthermore, state governments are also removing data from public access.
Florida governor Jeb Bush signed measures closing public access to information
on hospital security plans and information on emergency stockpiles of
pharmaceuticals. Florida lawmakers have also proposed restricting access to
information about cropdusters and about state investigations of food-borne
illnesses. Massachusetts legislators want to restrict access to records such as
blueprints for the state's bridges, tunnels and airports. Michigan and Tennessee
legislators are considering barring access to state emergency response plans. In
Oklahoma, among the sensitive materials legislators are considering restricting
are the times of school board meetings and the location of high pressure gas
lines.
Now, it is possible to make an honorable case for all of these deletions of public
information. Maps revealing the location of gas pipelines might very well be
useful to terrorists, though it would be even more useful to potential buyers of farm
land crossed by those pipelines. Information on safety flaws at chemical plants
might indeed be useful to terrorists, but it would be even more useful to
emergency workers in nearby communities. Educational and medical research
are always in need of updating, but then again, the traditional way of doing it is to
add new data rather than to erase the old.
The problem is that the previous presumption that publicly-funded information
should be available to the public has been replaced by the presumption that
government gets to decide whether people should have the information or not.
Gary Bass, of OMB Watch, a private group which monitors government spending
and legislation, says "We are moving from a right to know to a need to know
society." Where former Freedom of Information Act policy put the burden on the
federal agencies to justify withholding documents requested under FOIA,
Attorney General John Ashcroft's October 12, 2001 memo to federal agencies
instructed them to avoid releasing documents until after conducting a full review
of any possible security implications of the disclosure.
Isn't that convenient for government, given that the natural tendency for
government officials is toward secrecy? And if you don't believe that, see the
Audits and Surveys of State Freedom of Information laws
<http://foi.missouri.edu/openrecseries.html>, which reports on the project by a
number of news agencies to request public information from a variety of
agencies in 19 states; they were repeatedly forbidden access -- in Colorado, a
third of the time local agencies failed to comply with state public records law, in
Connecticut only 22% of agencies complied, in Maryland requesters had only "a
one-in-four chance of immediately getting what they are looking for."
September 11 has become a blanket excuse for governments to conduct their
business as they prefer to do -- in private, suppressing all kinds of information,
whether or not is has even the most tangential relation to national security, and
without any regard to valid public information needs.
Timothy Maier reports, in a story in the April 8 Insight Magazine, that "even
résumés of senior government officials are being censored in some agencies...
When reporter Todd Carter obtained resumes of EPA political appointees to post
on the Natural Resources News Service Website
<http://www.publicedcenter.org>, the EPA directed him not to post them because
of privacy concerns. The EPA then sent another batch of résumés that blacked
out education levels, awards, affiliations and even job experience. When asked
for the return of the unredacted résumés, Carter refused and posted résumés on
the news-service Website showing that EPA had brought in former Enron
employees"
<http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/229694.html>.
More information will presumably disappear when some government agencies
cease to exist as their functions are folded into the new Department of Homeland
Security. Among the agencies slated for extinction are the US Immigration and
Naturalization Service. Will anybody in the reconstituted agency preserve those
documents? If not, I hope that the University of North Texas librarians who
operate a "CyberCemetery" of the documents of defunct government agencies
<http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/> will preserve these pages as well
What's more, not only is there no government policy stipulating procedures and
determinants for the deletion of data from government web sites, no government
agency, not even FirstGov.gov, can even tell you what has been deleted from what
pages.
So who is keeping track of deleted data? As you would expect, government
document librarians are monitoring the situation closely; information on deletions
and other threats to public information is available on the Government Documents
Round Table web site <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/GODORT/>. GODORT has
also created a Task Force on Permanent Public Access to Government
Information <http://tigger.uic.edu/~tfontno/publicaccessindex.html>.
Other concerned groups include OMBWatch <http://ombwatch.org/>, which
monitors the deletion of government web pages, and the Federation of American
Scientists, which maintains a Project on Government Secrecy
<http://www.fas.org/sgp/>. The Project's director, Steven Aftergood, suggests
that what we need is an oversight panel to review deletion decisions so that
decisions to withhold public information could not be made "by some anonymous
agency official" without the possibility for the public to challenge them."
It seems to me that GODORT is on the right track with its task force for permanent
access to government documents, and there are plenty of willing organizations it
can partner with, but the job is too big for them. There are just too many web
documents to copy, and thanks to OMB's dictum that federal agencies should
ignore the Government Printing Office, even finding them will be a major
challenge.
Librarians -- not just government documents librarians, but all of us -- are going to
need to assume that information on government web pages will disappear. Just
as librarians have worked cooperatively to make sure that last copies of printed
works are not allowed to vanish, we will need to act cooperatively, and quickly, to
preserve information temporarily stored on government web pages.
Because it's not THEIR information, and we can't let them get away with deleting
it. We paid for it, and we need it, if we're to have any hope of knowing what our
government is doing. It's OUR information. Since giving people access to the
information their taxes paid for has always been our job, librarians are the ones
who are going to have to take on this challenge.
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