Word: nas
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Responding to mounting government concern that technological information with potential military applications may be reaching the Soviet Union and other adversaries through industry and the scientific community, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a report in September, 1982 on "Scientific Communication and National Security." The study was conducted by an NAS panel chaired by former Cornell University President Dale Corson. The authors expressed the hope that their recommendations would make it possible to "establish within the government an appropriate group to develop mechanisms and guidelines in the cooperative spirit that the report itself display...
...demand of Big Brother. In fact, the IRS has had increasing difficulty in keeping up with its paperwork on the six aging IBM computers installed back then at the national processing center in Martinsburg, W. Va. It is replacing them this spring with a new $10 million NAS 90-60 computer made by (guess who?) Hitachi of Japan. That will enable tax agents to match bank statements and other reports of income (from employers, brokerage houses, companies paying dividends, real estate registrars) with the returns of individual taxpayers...
Petty infighting and squabbling often develop when academics get together. It is therefore quite noteworthy that a panel of 19 leading scientists and University officials--meeting under the auspices of the NAS--recently gave examinations approach to a report on Scientific Communication and National Security. The panel was established in response to the leaders government its creasing tendency to champ down on the flow of technical information under the guise of "security concerns." The group concluded that "the country's long-team national security is best projected through the continued vitality and achievements of its economic technical scientific and intellectual...
...NAS report states unequivocally that "the best way to ensure long-term national security lies in a strategy of security by accomplishment, and that an essential ingredient of technological accomplishment is open and free scientific communication." The NAS panelists conclude that risk is involved with openness, yet they maintain that "risk is acceptable...because American industrial and military institutions have the capacity to develop new technology with a speed that will continue to give the United States a differential advantage over its military adversaries...
Although it adheres to the principles of open communication, the NAS report nevertheless argues that some limits should be placed on scientific exchange. In some cases, the NAS recommendations go beyond what many scientists would agree to under normal circumstances. But because these scholars feel these are not normal times, they feel concessions must be made, in the hope of preventing more drastic limitations...