Friday, October 3, 2003

1. LEAKS: IN WASHINGTON EVERYTHING LEAKS; BUT WHEN IS IT A CRIME?
In the aftermath of hurricane Isabel, even Washington basements started leaking. Last year's leak of a classified Pentagon report, The Nuclear Posture Review, described a plan to develop a new class of nuclear weapons (WN 15 Mar 02). It led to a heated public debate, which is good. Leaking it to the public was not a crime. However, last week's leak of the identity of a covert CIA agent was a crime, as it should be. It violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. An investigation is now underway to find the source of the leak. Maybe NASA can help. New software to pinpoint leaks will be installed in mission control, if NASA ever bothers to finish its orbiting turkey (ISS). Maybe the program would run on White House computers.

2. LAWS: THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT NEED AN OFFICIAL SECRETS ACT.
Secrecy News, the superb news letter written by Steven Aftergood for the Federation of American Scientists, points out that both NBC News and the Washington Post incorrectly reported that this latest leak also violated a law against disclosure of classified information. There is no such law. Secrecy News quotes Daniel Ellsberg as saying the stories "made it sound as if we already had an Official Secrets Act in this country." It was Ellsberg, you recall, who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Conscientious government employees willing to risk their careers by leaking classified documents may be the only check on government excesses carried out behind the screen of national security. Legislation prohibiting public disclosure of classified information was vetoed by President Clinton on 4 Nov 00, but there will be many more attempts to pass such a law.

3. NEW NIH: PHYSICISTS WILL BE WELCOME IN THE TRANSFORMED AGENCY.
On Tuesday, Elias Zerhouni revealed his plan to transform the way NIH funds efforts conquer disease. The sweeping changes are a recognition of the profound revolution taking place in medical science. Until about the middle of the 20th Century, advances in medicine most often resulted from serendipitous observations by brilliant loners: vaccination, aspirin, penicillin, come to mind. Today, advances rely on the enormous research strides into how the body works. In the new NIH, according to Zerhouni, the emphasis will be on interdisciplinary teams in which the physicians, geneticists, and biologists normally funded by NIH, will be joined by physicists, materials scientists and engineers. Previous crosscutting initiatives at NIH failed when competing institute directors resisted, and the new unity will be difficult to sustain without the 15 percent increases of recent years. Zerhouni's predecessor, Harold Varmus, urged increased funding for fields such as physics, with little success, but the new plan gives these fields a stake in increasing NIH funding.



Bob Park can be reached via email at whatsnew@bobpark.org
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
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