UC Libraries Quit NASA Databank in Rules Dispute

Reflecting a growing debate about national security and academic freedom, University of California libraries are dropping a scientific information service offered by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration rather than restrict its use to United States citizens as the federal government requires.

The citizenship restriction on use of the NASA RECON database violates UC policy against discrimination and would be very difficult to enforce because there are so many foreign students at UC campuses, university officials said. Furthermore, university librarians fear prosecution if they give, even inadvertently, the NASA research material to the wrong person.

Letter to Campuses

Calvin Moore, UC’s associate vice president for academic affairs, recently urged all UC libraries to cancel existing contracts for the NASA RECON service and to avoid signing any new ones. In a letter to the nine campuses, Moore said, “There are grounds to question the authority of a federal agency to impose such a restriction in the absence of express congressional authorization.”

The UC action comes at a time of tension between the federal government and research libraries on issues of access to knowledge and of FBI surveillance of libraries to investigate possible espionage. For example, UCLA librarians last week were cautioned not to cooperate with any authorities seeking information about library patrons and their reading habits.

Difficult Position

Nancy Koller, president of the Librarians Assn. of UC, said the NASA contract puts librarians in a difficult position. “Of course, librarians are not interested in doing anything to overthrow the government, but on the other hand they are very interested in confidentiality and freedom of information,” said Koller, who works at UC Riverside.

Through a computer network, the NASA database offers listings of hundreds of thousands of scientific documents on such topics as space flight, radar, metallurgy and weather, librarians said. It provides only a brief summary of the source material and tells where the complete version can be found. Depending on what type of contract is signed, the service can include classified materials--available only to certain users--but the restriction against foreign nationals applies to non-classified information as well.

Russell Shank, UCLA’s chief librarian, said he noticed the restriction in a proposed contract from RMS Associates, the Maryland firm that runs the database for NASA. “We have too many foreign students at UCLA and we haven’t gotten any indication that we are supposed to discriminate,” Shank said.

All Information Available

At UC Berkeley, head librarian Joseph Rosenthal said he recently canceled NASA RECON because “all of our information is at least conceptually available to anybody who comes in our doors.”

UCLA and UC Berkeley will sign up for a competing information service that allows use by foreigners not working on behalf of foreign governments. However, that other research system is much more expensive and, according to NASA, includes only about half of the listings in the NASA database. The NASA service costs $24 for each hour of computer time and five cents for each listing of a document, according to a proposed contract, and librarians said those fees usually are paid by students and other researchers.

John Wilson, NASA’s manager of the database, said the citizenship restriction has been in all contracts for at least the nine years he has had his job. He speculated that UC may have just recently noticed it.

“It’s not as if we are picking on universities. But there is no way we can give them an out. . . . When you have (the NASA database) sponsored with taxpayers’ money, you can’t take that wide open approach,” Wilson said. He added that he understands the problems schools face in enforcing the rule but he said the librarians who have the computer password to the database are the only ones who can protect the system. Wilson said he knows of no prosecution for allowing a foreigner to use the system.

Caltech, Stanford

Wilson said he did not have a complete listing of schools that use NASA RECON but he knows it included Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech librarians familiar with the database could not be reached for comment. The system is also in use at Stanford University, where Eleanor Goodchild, chief of the science libraries, said she did not think her contract prohibited use by foreigners. However, Goodchild said Stanford officials would discuss the matter if the contract turns out to contain that restriction.

At UCLA, Shank said his formal instructions last week that library employees are not to comply with requests from individuals or agencies for information about library patrons was not directly related to the controversy over the database. He said he wanted “to protect library employees who may otherwise be intimidated by badges.”

He was referring to the visit last year by two FBI agents to UCLA’s Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Library. They were seeking information on a student from the Soviet Union who was in Los Angeles for one month and who allegedly had used the library. No one recognized a photo of the student and FBI agents later telephoned the library, asking whether “anyone suspicious” had been there, Shank said.

Surveillance Stepped Up

During recent congressional hearings, FBI officials said they stepped up surveillance of New York-area libraries after the arrest in 1986 of a Soviet agent who allegedly recruited a graduate student to gather technical information from university libraries. FBI Director William Sessions told a House subcommittee that his agency’s so-called Library Awareness Program was an important counterintelligence tool and that librarians are free to refuse cooperation. Hearings are to resume later this month.

Last month, two liberal lobbying organizations filed suit in a Washington federal court seeking more information about that FBI program. People for the American Way, which describes itself as a nonpartisan constitutional liberties group, and the National Security Archive, which collects unclassified government documents, alleged that the FBI surveillance is much wider than the agency acknowledges.