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awhyzipSo I was eating dinner in the cafeteria with a handful of friends, and one (a Math/Physics major) tells us about all the exciting things they are getting to learn in her physics class because it has recently been declassified.
I don't quite recall if the course's topic was specifically nucelar physics, but nucelar studies are the ones that were being released. In 20 years we can anticipate to learn about what was done in the Cold War.
Does this anticipation seem odd to anyone else? It did to me. I think of the secret stories of unannounced civilian testings as dirty government ill-judgements. That government research would decide it was an OK idea to, say, expose vast groups to various agents, or set off thermonuclear devices in deserts upwind from people's tribes, or slip whatever into breakfast oatmeal...it's illicit! And I have thought of the non-disclosure of these schemes by people, who MUST have learned of them, as moral failings. I forget that the actions were taken under top secret classifications. The secrecy was enforced, not simply complicit.
One cannot assume that a changed social atmosphere toward experimentaion on unaware (and all too often on socially disempowered) groups would be able to stand against national-security classification. We will be uncovering records 50 years from now again. I'd like to believe that there won't be anything queasy hidden there this time, but I don't trust it.
My mistrust has gotten worse as time has gone on this past, post-september-11, year. The Patriot Act not only demands of institutions such as libraries that they open their records to federal questions, but forbids any institution from acknowedging if records have been demanded of it. Forbids! From publicizing when the law is used!
That gets me going, it really does. This is a law -- how may it be secret? I can ponder the question of the rightness of this information-gathering: maybe it is justified, maybe it is invasion, maybe it is useful, maybe neccessary. I am not convinced it is good, but I am not convinced of the opposite either. Yet, to conceal the very operation of the questionable activity, that is a violation of a deeply immoral sort.
I don't quite recall if the course's topic was specifically nucelar physics, but nucelar studies are the ones that were being released. In 20 years we can anticipate to learn about what was done in the Cold War.
Does this anticipation seem odd to anyone else? It did to me. I think of the secret stories of unannounced civilian testings as dirty government ill-judgements. That government research would decide it was an OK idea to, say, expose vast groups to various agents, or set off thermonuclear devices in deserts upwind from people's tribes, or slip whatever into breakfast oatmeal...it's illicit! And I have thought of the non-disclosure of these schemes by people, who MUST have learned of them, as moral failings. I forget that the actions were taken under top secret classifications. The secrecy was enforced, not simply complicit.
One cannot assume that a changed social atmosphere toward experimentaion on unaware (and all too often on socially disempowered) groups would be able to stand against national-security classification. We will be uncovering records 50 years from now again. I'd like to believe that there won't be anything queasy hidden there this time, but I don't trust it.
My mistrust has gotten worse as time has gone on this past, post-september-11, year. The Patriot Act not only demands of institutions such as libraries that they open their records to federal questions, but forbids any institution from acknowedging if records have been demanded of it. Forbids! From publicizing when the law is used!
That gets me going, it really does. This is a law -- how may it be secret? I can ponder the question of the rightness of this information-gathering: maybe it is justified, maybe it is invasion, maybe it is useful, maybe neccessary. I am not convinced it is good, but I am not convinced of the opposite either. Yet, to conceal the very operation of the questionable activity, that is a violation of a deeply immoral sort.
