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Is it Secret if it's on the Web?:
Ted Postol and the DoD

Geoffrey Forden

On the evening of June 23rd, 1997, the Pentagon launched an interceptor missile from a Pacific Atoll at a group of incoming balloons, decoys, and a mock warhead. While the interceptor flew past those objects, it has collided head on with academic freedom, national security, and the first Amendment. At the center of this collision is Professor Theodore Postol, who is using a report written largely at Lincoln Laboratory to show that the 1997 test flight data casts significant doubt on whether or not the proposed national missile defense system will ever work. The cast of characters includes whistleblowers, declassified reports, Russian Websites, special agents, and lawyers who represent the MIT administration but not faculty members.

The primary goal of that first test flight was to gather data on the appearance of the various incoming objects. That data were then used to test a variety of guidance and control algorithms that future interceptors might use to discriminate the real warhead from decoys and home in on it. However, some scientists involved in those computer tests did not feel that they were going very well. When the interceptor's manufacturer told the Government it had succeeded in distinguishing real from fake warheads, TRW scientist Nira Schwartz blew the whistle, claiming that such statements were fraudulent and that the data showed the exact opposite. This was not to be the only time serious allegations were made against the interceptor's manufacturer. For instance, nearly a year later a competing interceptor design was chosen – well ahead of schedule – amid allegations that TRW's design team had improperly obtained information from its competitor.

In response to Schwartz's claims of fraud, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) launched an inquiry and the Defense Department asked an independent team of scientists to review the data and the various claims. That group, known as the POET, for Phase One Engineering Team, consisted of scientists and engineers from around the country, including MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Its report, classified as SECRET, supported TRW's claim that the interceptor could discriminate between real warheads and decoys; essentially refuting all of Dr. Schwartz's claims. The DCIS internal investigation, however, had become convinced that there was substantial truth to the allegations and continued its investigation. As a convenience for communicating with Dr. Schwartz, the investigators redacted various portions of the POET study and sent her an unclassified version so that they could continue discussions. It is this redacted report that forms the basis of the present controversy.

Charges that the national missile defense system was fatally flawed were widely reported in the media. Theodore Postol, professor of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, saw the accounts and organized a daylong workshop at MIT's Security Studies Program to try to understand the issues. During this workshop, Schwartz presented her claims and evidence to about 20 scientists and engineers from MIT and elsewhere. Her presentation included a discussion of the declassified POET report, which she left with Postol.

There was still a significant amount of information in the report, even after it had been redacted. So much information that some maintain that Postol should have realized it had been declassified by mistake. For instance, the relative brightness of the various incoming objects is shown as a function of time, including the time axis units, while the so-called power density – a mathematically transformed plot of the same data – had its axis removed since that was considered sensitive. Obviously, knowing the brightness data would allow a scientist to reconstruct the power density.

On the other hand, such inconsistencies in declassification are fairly common. An example, which is not involved in the Postol case, is the chemically powered Space-based Laser (SBL). The SBL's design power is considered secret yet the Defense Department openly publishes design rates of chemical consumption from which its power can be derived. These questions of what constitutes "inadvertently declassified data," and what are the responsibilities of an academic researcher, are important to anyone who applies scientific analysis to policy questions.

In the case of the POET report, Postol believed he had found significant evidence that the independent review had been less than thorough and that, in fact, the data showed fundamental physical problems in discriminating between decoys and real warheads. In the spring of 2000, he wrote a letter to then White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, spelling out his findings. Postol concluded that TRW had selected specific time intervals of data that favored discrimination, discarded objects from the data set because they were too difficult to identify, and changed data and procedures to force the system to choose the correct object as the incoming warhead. Postol also wrote that the Defense Department changed later tests of the system by dropping decoys that would be too hard to correctly identify as decoys.

Within a week of writing that letter, Postol learned, unofficially, that the Defense Department had classified his entire letter as secret. The only official acknowledgement Postol received was six weeks later when three agents of the Defense Security Service visited MIT with a classified letter for Postol. From Postol's point of view, this letter represented a dilemma. So far, he had never received any classified briefings or, knowingly, other sensitive information on missile defense. All his research was based on applying his knowledge of physics and engineering to publicly available information. If he read the letter it might preclude him from speaking out on an important aspect of public policy that he believed had serious flaws and even misconduct. It would certainly prevent him from claiming that he had never read a classified document regarding the national missile defense. On the other hand, the Defense Department was presumably trying to inform him that the POET report had been improperly declassified.

Of course, by this time the redacted version of the POET report had been distributed around the world. The report and Postol's analysis were widely available on the Internet. On a practical level, there was nothing the Government could do to prevent people from reading them. Silencing Postol would not have any effect on foreign access to this information (a Russian Website was one of the places it was available) but it would stifle the US debate on the wisdom of this system. Postol decided not to read the letter and to continue discussing the flaws in the national missile defense system as he saw them. And because of the futility of the Defense Department in trying to stop dissemination of the report, Postol believed that the visit of the three agents had been to intimidate or trap him into not discussing his conclusions.

Representative Edward Markey, Democrat of the Massachusetts 7th congressional district, was concerned enough to ask the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate Postol's claims of intimidation. That investigation determined that the Defense Department agents who visited Postol were acting according to Department regulations regarding "derivative classified information," since they considered the POET report to have been improperly declassified. However, the GAO investigation did not evaluate the relevance of that standard when the report was widely available.

Most recently, the Defense Department wrote the MIT administration requesting, among other things, that MIT retrieve the POET report from Postol. Initially, President Vest indicated that MIT might have to take some initial steps to comply with the request since he felt bound by the contract establishing Lincoln Laboratory. However, in a meeting later with faculty and senior researchers at MIT's Security Studies Program, President Vest reaffirmed that MIT would never remove such research items from a member of the faculty. Still, many present disagreed with Vest's tactics and felt MIT should have taken a stronger initial position defending a faculty member's right to do research.

These issues extend far beyond the Postol case. The Government is, for instance, tightening export controls on satellite technology. Recently, Stanford University had to drop plans to launch a student-made satellite on a Russian launch vehicle; the Government was insisting that the school register as an arms exporter and apply for a license. While not formally classifying information routinely taught in classes, the Government is creating new definitions of sensitive information.

Both these cases raise a number of vexing problems for the academic community. What obligations does a university have to enforce Government regulations that limit free inquiry? What exactly constitutes inadvertently declassified information? Does the extent of a document's dissemination matter? How much does it matter that a document helps uncover fraud or other misdeeds?

All scientific research is enhanced by open and free debate. Such scrutiny not only finds innocent flaws in analyses but also detects and even deters scientific fraud. Of course, there are important and understandable reasons why some military research needs to forego the benefits of such scrutiny. You can judge for yourself the validity of Postol's analysis by studying the original POET report (it is available on the Web at http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/news00/postol_051100.html together with Postol's letters to the White House. However, if you do download this information, the Defense Department can ask the MIT administration to remove it from your computer.

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