Keeping a Lid on a Hot Story? NASA Scientists Challenge Security Rules

[kpete]

Thursday, August 30, 2007
NASA Scientists Challenge Security Rules
Dave Lindorff

Keeping a Lid on a Hot Story? NASA Scientists Challenge Security Rules
(from The Nation magazine online)


Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.


The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.


"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director Griffin putting a security wrap around us."


Nelson and 26 other JPL scientists and other employees have retained a Pasadena civil rights law firm to file suit in federal court in California to block the security program.


For the rest of this story, please go to The Nation Online.


12:51 pm pdt

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/lindorff

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. g'dammit KPETE

everytime I think we have reached the bottom of that scummy barrel, you come up with something like this. something outrageous and disgusting. something that makes me worry all over again for our nation's future.

It is like being in a nachtmare and you cannot, no matter how hard you try, wake up. damn them all.

[RC]

2. This is more of government wide paranoia

You might be a terrorist, so they gotta investigate ya to find out. You know like the passport thingy.

Wanta really stop the terrorist? Put the administration in Leavenworth to await the conclusion of the investigations into their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

[DeSwiss]

3. Treachery know no bounds.... K&R!!!