An alarming series of tweets today from my faculty colleague, cryptographer Matthew Green, at Johns Hopkins, say that the dean of the Engineering School told him to take down his blog post about the National Security Agency. Why? Because it linked to Snowden documents published by The New York Times and other news media. Green believes the censorship gambit originated at the Applied Physics Laboratory, Hopkins’s “off-campus” research center in Laurel, Maryland–just a stone’s throw from NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters in more ways than one–that annually performs hundreds of millions of dollars of secret military and intelligence work (and keeps the university perennially atop the list of the nation’s richest government R&D contractors). If true, this would mark an egregious abridgement of free speech on campus, along with a transfusion of pigheadedness from military circles that already forbid their members to read these documents that are widely available online. It would be odd if other top administrators, including president Ron Daniels (a lawyer), were out of the loop on this action, but the Hopkins bureaucracy is certainly as capable as any other of such blunders. When Daniels became president in 2009 while still a Canadian citizen, oversight of APL was transferred from his office to the university’s board of trustees because he could not hold a US security clearance. (Not that this mattered, since oversight per se has always been a hollow formality. The Department of Defense controls classified research, not college administrators.)
update: The decision tree has yet to be revealed. No one should hold their breath waiting for the Hopkins faculty, largely a hidebound mandarinate, to mount a group protest against this attack on academic freedom.
Here is what the university p.r. office emailed to inquiring reporters at ProPublica: “The blog post originally was spotted by someone at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. A message was sent from a staff member at APL to a staff member at the Homewood campus calling attention to the post. That message may have been understood as a request for action, though I am told it was intended only as an FYI. The Homewood staff member called the post to the attention of the dean. The dean wrote to Professor Green, and you know the rest.”
Taken at face value, this speaks of an impetuous dean who had no qualms about scuttling a professor’s blog, though he has since apologized. The evident coziness between APL and Homewood, Hopkins’s main campus in Baltimore, is sickening. Major American universities that carried military R&D centers out of the post-World War II arms build-up–Cornell (Cornell Aeronautical Lab), Stanford (Stanford Research Institute), Princeton and Columbia (Institute for Defense Analysis), etc.–severed the relationship a generation ago when the Vietnam War made secret work untenable in academia for myriad reasons. (MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory is a notable exception.) Hopkins, however, never flinched, mainly because poorly endowed Homewood needed the quid pro quo–about $20 million a year–from the U.S. Navy for use of its good name in an enterprise that has absolutely nothing to do with education.
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Here’s how APL’s website describes its work for NSA: “As a designated trusted agent to the National Security Agency (NSA) Chief Systems Engineer, APL provides NSA with independent, objective technical advice across a broad set of systems engineering and architecture challenges. The trusted agent relationship is integral to the NSA Systems Engineering and Architecture Project. APL staff working with NSA are engaged in strategic planning, development of enterprise and program architectures, conducting quantitative analysis to support engineering decisions, development of engineering processes, and formulation of the governance structures for the work in the new Technology Directorate (TD). APL led a multi-organizational team that produced a plan to define and implement new time and frequency standards across the Cryptologic Enterprise, formulated a scalable process for technical review of all TD programs, and developed concepts and requirements for tagging and tracking data throughout the signals intelligence system. APL also completed a strategic study that analyzed NSA’s global information technology infrastructure to determine the top locations for the large-scale data centers.” In plain English: APL does it all.
