Friday, 15 July 1988
1.
THE FBI RESPONDED TO CRITICS OF ITS LIBRARY AWARENESS PROGRAM
on Wednesday in a continuation of the oversight hearings of the
Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House
Judiciary Committee (WN 24 Jun 88).
James Geer, Assistant
Director of the FBI, sought to portray criticism from librarians
as an over-reaction to the legitimate counterintelligence efforts
of the Bureau. In general, Soviet citizens violate no laws in
collecting unclassified technical information from libraries, but
Geer noted that there is one exception: President Carter issued
an executive order barring Soviets from access to the National
Technical Information Service (NTIS). NTIS collects and
disseminates unclassified reports on government-sponsored
research (WN 16 Jul 87). The intrusion
of the FBI into libraries,
however, is not, as some defenders have claimed, a sort of
"neighborhood watch program." In 37 states, when an FBI agent
without a court order approaches a library employee seeking
information about library users, the agent is suborning a crime.
Rep. Don Edwards (D-CA), the subcommittee chairman, was sharply
critical of the FBI's failure to provide its agents with
guidelines for dealing with libraries. The news media sought the
response of library spokespersons to Geer's twice-delayed
testimony, only to discover that most of them were at the annual
meeting of the American Library Association in New Orleans.
2
. "SYMMETRICAL ACCESS TO TECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH"
is required by the new trade bill (H.R.4848). Section 5171 of
the bill requires
that federally supported international science and technology
agreements should be negotiated to ensure that "...the flow of
scientific and technological information are, to the maximum
extent practicable, equitable and reciprocal." It is a perfectly
reasonable requirement, but stating it explicitly in the trade
bill reflects the widespread myth that America's competitiveness
gap results from a one-sided flow of technical secrets. Now that
the plant-closing notification portions of the bill have been
separated out, the trade bill has reasonable prospects for
passage this session. The responsibility for implementing the
symmetrical access policy is assigned to the Secretary of State.
3. PRESIDENT REAGAN AWARDED THE 1988 NATIONAL MEDAL OF SCIENCE
and the National Medal of Technology to 30 persons in a White
House ceremony this morning. The distinguished recipients
included a number of members of the American Physical Society,
including Norman Ramsey of Harvard, APS President in 1978;
William O. Baker, the retired head of Bell Laboratories; Allen
Bromley, of Yale; Paul Chu, of the University of Houston; Walter
Kohn, of the University of California at Santa Barbara; Harold
Edgerton, of MIT and the EG&G Corp.; and Paul Lauterbur, of the
University of Illinois. Among the other recipients were Ralph
Gomory, of IBM; Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid; David
Packard, of Hewlett-Packard; and Jack Steinberger of CNRS.
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