No more secrets What we don’t know could kill us BY JESS KILBY

An interesting story blipped through the news cycle last week, barely causing a ripple in the collective American consciousness before bubbling back down below the surface. But the issue at stake remains unresolved, and we ignore the eventual outcome at our own peril.

I’m referring to the tale of Sean Gorman, a George Mason University Ph.D. candidate, who, as the Washington Post reported on July 8, is facing the imminent possibility that his doctoral dissertation might be classified by the government before he can even present it and receive his degree. The feds fear that Gorman’s work, a mapping program of "every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them," would, as the Post sensationally describes, constitute a "terrorist treasure map" in the wrong hands.

There’s no denying that Gorman has compiled an impressive array of information, with potentially chilling implications: "He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where," writes the Post. "He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: ‘If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?’ "

Gorman’s work reportedly had the private sector just as freaked as the government; following a demonstration of his program at "a forum of chief information officers of the country’s largest financial services companies," Gorman found that the executives who had just been briefed on their companies’ greatest weaknesses feared to let him leave the building in possession of his laptop.

Even those who aren’t direct stakeholders in the matter are piling on. Richard Clarke, who resigned his post as White House cybersecurity czar in January, told the Post that Gorman should "turn [his dissertation] in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it." The Post itself "agreed not to print the results of Gorman’s research, at the insistence of GMU."

There’s only one problem with all this cloak-and-dagger business, which Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld finally gets around to mentioning in paragraph 10 of her article: All the data Gorman used to compile his "mega-map" is freely available on the Internet. Anybody with the inclination and the resources (being time, patience, and a Web connection) could duplicate his efforts. Who’s to say, in fact, that such a thing hasn’t already happened?

But rather than recognize Gorman’s map as the astoundingly useful piece of open-source intelligence that it is, and use it to better protect ourselves against people who quite possibly have the same information at their disposal, we’re getting the suggestion from a former high-level White House security expert to chuck the damn thing in the incinerator.

What?

Now, it can be argued that just because the information is classified doesn’t mean it’s being ignored by US intelligence officials. Fine — here’s hoping that it won’t simply disappear into a filing cabinet in the bowels of some government agency. But there’s the root problem of deciding what to classify, if the source data of the condemned project is already in the public domain. How do you get that cat back into the bag?

Beyond that, there’s the consideration that the material being classified — whether it’s just the neatly packaged end result or also the publicly available components that comprise it — serves many legitimate purposes that would suffer from the loss of such knowledge. As one anonymous poster on slashdot.com writes about the issue, "How is the public to decide if a tax increase is necessary to secure certain facilities? How will anyone be able to decide if a security program effectively addresses the real risks or if it is just a secretive boondoggle? How will regulatory commissions be able to decide whether utility rates should increase to fund security? How will rate increases be justified to the public?"

In other words, how will we know if our government is acting in our best interest if the tools for oversight are taken away from individual citizens and nonprofit watchdog groups? Do you trust the Bush administration to do the right thing when nobody is watching? Whether through sheer incompetence or willful treachery, our current heads of state have hardly inspired confidence in their leadership abilities these past two years. There’s no reason to believe they’ll get this one right either, especially if they have the luxury of obfuscation.

We live in an increasingly transparent world, where information that was once only available to state entities with million-dollar satellites and far-reaching intelligence agencies is now accessible to anybody with the wherewithal to Google it. Stamping public knowledge with a big red "CLASSIFIED" only perpetuates the illusion of total state control, and aggressively trying to remove knowledge from the public domain will only drag us back into the dark ages.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com