Delivered at MIT, Cambridge, MA, March 29, 1999.

I have been a science librarian all of my life, and though my mission has always been to maintain the maximum flow of information to all researchers, my personal experience with the competing requirements of openness and confidentiality has some relevance to the debate of secrecy in science.

From 1973 until the late 1980s, the FBI conducted a secret surveillance program within America's unclassified scientific libraries, including both public and university libraries. That program, known as the Library Awareness Program, had two goals:

1. To restrict access by foreign nationals, particularly Soviet and East Europeans, to unclassified scientific information;
2. To recruit librarians to report on any "foreigners" using America's unclassified scientific libraries.

To accomplish these goals, FBI agents would approach clerical staff at public and university libraries, flash a badge and appeal to their patriotism in preventing the spread of "sensitive but unclassified" information to potential enemies. There was a great deal of disinformation passed to librarians from these agents as well. For one thing we were told that a presidential executive order prohibited any Soviet citizen or any East European citizen from reading any NTIS (National Technical Information Service) reports. My library had about a million and a half of those reports, all unclassified.

It turned out that the executive order story was completely bogus, but it may have led some librarians to deny scientific information to foreign nationals. Even more disturbing than the attempt to prevent access to materials was the attempt to get librarians to reveal the names and reading habits of foreigners using the libraries, what books they checked out, what database searches they requested, even their questions to reference librarians. At my university, the agents told librarians that they should report to the FBI anyone with a "foreign sounding name or foreign sounding accent."

I don't know what the makeup of your campus [MIT] is, but at at the University of Maryland that would cover about two-thirds of the students and faculty, all of whom were supposed to be reported to the FBI, along with their scientific interests. Because the Library Awareness Program attempted to avoid dealing with library supervisors or administrators, it was kept under wraps for several years. But once librarians like myself became aware of it, a powerful resistance to that program emerged within the library profession.

Now as I said, there were two conflicting issues involved here: openness and confidentiality. We can see in my circumstance that these were not necessarily incompatible. Confidentiality, as we've heard earlier today, is really a form of secrecy.

I made clear to my library staff, and to the broader community through my publications and my testimony before Congress, that unclassified scientific materials in any college or university were available to anyone regardless of their nationality, that we did not check passports at the door.

Second, I invoked the longstanding professional ethics of the library profession that says that any interaction between a library user and the library staff is confidential. Their reading habits, their questions, their scientific interests are not the business of the FBI or of anyone else for that matter. I subsequently worked with the Maryland legislature to codify that ethical position into law and that law was passed in Maryland making it illegal for any librarian to reveal patron records to the FBI or anyone else. Most states have followed with their own laws. I think something like 42 or 45 states now have library confidentiality laws.

Let me just conclude by listing three or four science and secrecy topics that I'm concerned with. The first is the obvious, that there is still much too much information being classified. Every government official, regardless of whether they are conservative or liberal, every official that I know of who has ever written on the topic says that excessive classification undermines national security. As Senator Moynihan quoted Justice Potter Stewart this morning, "When everything is classified, nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion."

A second topic of concern is the continuing federal controls, including export controls, on civilian research in cryptography. Scott and Ron will probably address both sides of that later.

Another issue is the secrecy surrounding the now routine use of depleted uranium, called DU, in American shells and missiles. Depleted uranium is a danger to both humans and the environment and there is strong evidence to implicate it in such illnesses as the Gulf War Syndrome.

Finally, I am concerned about scientific secrecy and the corrupt way that science has been used with respect to weapons of mass destruction. The recent bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan was said to be done in an attempt to prevent the possible production of chemical weapons. The scientific evidence supporting that view was later shown to be weak or falsified. Similarly, the scientific rationale for the now discredited UNSCOM operation in Iraq had a similar stench about it.

After a delegation of Catholic priests visited Iraq a year or two ago, Simon Harak, a professor of religion, described one of these UNSCOM efforts at secret science, and I quote:

So I am concerned that there is a growing movement to relegate much of the world to permanent scientific ignorance in the name of protecting us against such weapons.

Program |Speaker Bios | Presentations | Selected Readings | Home