Two days ago, we wondered how much "national security" work was done @ NASA. Here's an answer from The Nation. (Also available @ Yahoo!® NEWS Opinion, where we first found it, & where the font is bigger & more legible.)"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us."
The security crackdown has nothing to do w/ Little Debbie Snackcake's fear of "Moozlim infiltration" of NASA; it's thought by those on the receiving end to be an attempt to keep any information on global climate change from reaching the public.
The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national
security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.
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