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By Lawrence K. Grossman
Lawrence K. Grossman is a former president of NBC News and PBS..
Back in the 1980s, a series of horrific chemical accidents in India, Mexico, and the U.S. killed, injured, or forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. In 1990, Congress ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to require every chemical facility in the nation to prepare a plan for dealing with a worst-case scenario, and then to make all the plans available to the public. Armed with that information, citizens would know what possible risks they face and could pressure local plants to improve their safety records. The deadline for submission of those plans was June 21, 1999.
The EPA announced it intended to post all the worst-case scenario plans on its Web site so that, with the stroke of a computer key, anybody living near a chemical plant could log on to the EPA’s Web site and learn how many in the community might be killed or maimed from a massive accidental release of toxic fumes, what chemicals are manufactured and stored, how many chemical accidents that plant had in the past five years, the location of nearby schools and hospitals, and what emergency response steps would be taken in the event of a disaster.
Industry groups and law enforcement agencies railed against the EPA’s decision to post the information on the Internet, calling it a "national security risk," a godsend for terrorists looking for an opportunity to wreak havoc on the United States. The FBI warned that the EPA’s Web site could be used "as a targeting mechanism in a terrorist or criminal incident." To House Commerce Committee chairman Tom Bliley (R-Va.), the EPA’s modern-day response to the law Congress had passed almost a decade earlier (before anyone would have even considered making anything public via the Internet) was a "reckless plan to put the data at every terrorist’s fingertips…easily searchable from Boston to Baghdad, from Los Angeles to Libya."
Since Gutenberg invented the printing press, authorities have greeted every major advance in information technology with fear and suspicion. The Internet is no exception. "As new technologies have acquired the functions of the press," MIT media scholar Itheil de Sola Pool wrote, "they have not acquired the rights of the press." Each new information technology has received less constitutional protection than its predecessors. It’s as if the First Amendment has had to be reinvented for every new medium.
Presumably, if the EPA had decided to make the information public through traditional media, like newspapers, television, and radio, no ruckus would have been raised. Indeed, that’s what Congress expected the agency to do when it amended the Clean Air Act in 1990 and ordered the EPA to gather, and then go public with the worst-case scenario information. But the Internet is a brand-new medium, with fast-growing public access and instantaneous worldwide distribution. Authorities fear its power to put information into the wrong hands, or into the hands of those who are ill-prepared to handle it responsibly.
Under pressure, the EPA quickly backed away from its Internet plan. In June the Senate passed a bill, now being considered by the House, that gives the administration one year to figure out how to release the chemical disaster information without letting it fall into the wrong hands.
I asked staff members of the House Commerce Committee how they thought that could be done. The options they suggested seem of dubious practicality: The EPA could put the data on a CD Rom that people can read but not reproduce. The agency could make the information available in library reading rooms and government offices without printers; people would be prohibited from copying any of it by hand. The EPA could release the data for only a few sites at a time and limit the copies available to ten to fifty. It could keep the information from the general public altogether and release the data only to local fire, emergency, environment, and law enforcement officials, thereby, of course, thwarting the major purpose of the 1990 law.
Veteran newspaperman Paul K. McMasters, representing the Freedom of Information Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, testified against the Senate bill on the grounds that, "restricting the flow of information leaves citizens in ignorance while a variety of information is readily available to would-be-terrorists who care to check telephone and city directories (online or off-line), attend chemical industry trade shows, check out chemical manufacturing directories in libraries, peruse EPA databases already posted, or even access congressional testimony posted on the Internet."
The concern of chairman Bliley and others, that the EPA’s worst-scenario information could be used for evil purposes, is understandable. But the newspaper editors are right. Any terrorist in the world who surfs the ‘net today can find a treasure trove of free intelligence about the nation’s chemical facilities by logging on to Dowchemical.com, Exxon.com, Unioncarbide.com, and other such Web sites.
I did, and within thirty minutes I gathered a comprehensive list of the chemical products the companies make, the locations of their major U.S. chemical production and storage facilities, and toll-free phone numbers that promise to deliver still more detailed information if called. A terrorist who logs on to the Environmental Defense Fund’s Web site, www.scorecard.org, will find easy-to-read maps marked with neat red squares showing the precise location of every U.S. chemical facility that has experienced an accidental emission.
Last June, another government agency, the National Institutes of Health, ignited a similarly passionate controversy over a seemingly benign proposal to release biomedical research reports on the Internet. The NIH director, Nobel Laureate Dr. Harold E. Varmus, recommended that full biomedical research information be made available at no cost to anyone anywhere in the world who logs on to a proposed new NIH Web site, E-biomed (cjr, July/August). Varmus said that his idea for an NIH Internet publishing initiative would be "a democratizing force" that could speed the progress of science by accelerating the exchange of information among scientists, and vastly increase its accessibility to patients, scientists, and doctors the world over. With more than 22 million adults now going online to find health information, it isn’t fear of terrorists that’s causing the fuss over the NIH plan but fear that ordinary Americans would use the Internet to gain unfettered access to biomedical research without the guidance of scientists, doctors, or expert journalists.
An unusually critical editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine by the magazine’s respected former top editor, Dr. Arnold S. Relman of Harvard Medical School, called Varmus’s proposal "risky at best" because it could confuse and alarm online consumers. Patients and even doctors might misinterpret or misunderstand experimental data, with disastrous consequences. Other critics complain that E-biomed threatens the survival of hugely profitable traditional publications like the New England Journal of Medicine, whose readers would have little reason to buy them if they can get the contents free online.
In defense of Varmus, a research scientist in Adelaide, Australia, posted an e-mail comparing E-biomed to the introduction of literacy and printing technology in medieval Europe. "Were all books going to be authoritative and accurate? Were some dangerous to society?" he asked. "We can imagine priests saying, ‘Mass printing and wide dissemination of books is O.K. so long as we insure that every book is approved by a priest review process.’" In the early days of printing, of course, every publication had to be approved by church or government authorities who feared that unlicensed printers might spread dangerous information.
In today’s multimedia world, it is actually no longer possible to give people the information they need while withholding it from the few who may misuse it. Propelled by the Internet, the means of disseminating information are rapidly outstripping anyone’s ability to restrict or suppress it, including information that, in evil hands, might be considered dangerous. It’s the price we pay for the tremendous benefits the Information Age brings to us all, for the first time making available what we need to know about the risks of chemical accidents in our communities, as well as full reports on the latest advances in biomedical research.
