HIDING SPACE

A recently discovered memorandum from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has some startling advice for NASA officials who anticipate Freedom of Information Act requests for their records. Among the document's suggestions:

At the conclusion of meetings or at the end of the day review your notes and consider whether you really need to retain them. If you do, take time to rewrite them in such a way as to minimize any adverse impact should they be publicly disclosed. Then destroy your old notes.

Avoid retaining drafts of documents. Each draft constitutes a separate document potentially subject to disclosure.

Use yellow stick-ons or other similar attachable tabs to annotate personal copies of documents you wish to retain. Annotations on a document make the annotated copy a separate document potentially subject to disclosure. If retained, yellow stick-ons would also be subject to FOIA disclosure. However, since there is no obligation under FOIA to provide documents in any particular order or relationship to each other, furnishing out of context copies of stick-ons can render any information released significantly less meaningful.

Attempt to make each document (i.e. page) stand alone. Avoid cross references to other documents that can lend context to a document and thereby enhance its informational value should it ultimately be disclosed.

The internal memo was issued in November 1989 at the request of an interagency group reviewing a program to put into space a nuclear reactor -- called SP-100 -- following the group's first meeting. It was discovered during a review of SP-100 by the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, chaired by Michigan Democrat Howard Wolpe.

The memo, says Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, "is outrageous, and completely contrary to the spirit and letter of the Freedom of Information Act." Even NASA agrees, at least in public. But in the memo an aberration or an indication of NASA's true attitude toward public disclosure and the press?

An expert on SP-100 and a frequent FOIA requester, Aftergood notes that his own Freedom of Information Act experience with NASA has been good, adding, "I would rate NASA on the upper end of the scale in terms of disclosure." NASA itself claims that the memo represents an "isolated" incident. Public interest groups, however, along with many journalists who write on NASA, see the memorandum as part of a pattern of disinformation and evasion.

In its "FYI Media Alert" for 1992, a summary and analysis of hundreds of attempts by the Bush administration to restrict public access to information, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press gave NASA low marks. Examples included the agency's vast underestimation of the cost of building the proposed Freedom space station and an incident in which a prominent NASA scientist was forced to alter his testimony before Congress about the dangers of the greenhouse effect.

Jane Kirtley, executive director of the Reporters Committee, says NASA changed dramatically after the fatal crash of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. "NASA used to have a reputation as one of the most open agencies of all," Kirtley says. "Since Challenger, they've slammed the door shut" (see "NASA and the Spellbound Press," CJR, July/August 1986).

Robert Holtz, editor-in-chief of Aviation Week & Space Technology from 1955 to 1980, and a member of the presidential commission assigned to examine the Challenger disaster, goes further. He flatly states that NASA has a history of lying to the public that extends back to its beginnings. "NASA doesn't live by the law," he says. "Their attitude is, 'We went to the moon and back 00 we can do anything.'"

In response to Congressman Wolpe's concerns, NASA conducted an investigation into the memo, but Wolpe deemed the results unacceptable. His aides point to "discrepancies" in NASA testimony. For example, the memo's author, NASA attorney William Sikora, and Sikora's boss, Larry Ross, told the investigator they could not remember just why the memorandum was prepared. But an internal memo by another Lewis employee quotes Ross as telling his senior staff that the guidelines were intended to block attempts by a group of "anti-nuke" protesters to obtain records on the space nuclear program.

Wolpe demanded a second investigation, and this time NASA put its inspector general, Bill D. Colvin, in charge. Asked how his review is different from the first, Colvin says, "I am putting everyone under oath."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe