The Unbearable Being of Lightness

Both the Bush and Clinton Administrations allowed scientists access to military satellite data in order to track meteoroids crashing into the atmosphere. But now, without explanation, the “most transparent Administration in history” has called a halt to the information sharing.

A recent U.S. military policy decision now explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released, SPACE.com has learned.

The satellites' main objectives include detecting nuclear bomb tests, and their characterizations of asteroids and lesser meteoroids as they crash through the atmosphere has been a byproduct data bonanza for scientists.

The upshot: Space rocks that explode in the atmosphere are now classified.

"The fireball data from military or surveillance assets have been of critical importance for assessing the impact hazard [of asteroids crashing into the Earth]," said David Morrison, a Near Earth Object (NEO) scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. He noted that his views are his own, not as a NASA spokesperson.

Your humble observer cannot envision a scenario where this change in policy was due to a Machiavellian malevolence on the part of the Administration. More likely, it is merely displaying its true tendency to be opaque rather than transparent.

No Administration can possibly have devised policy positions on every detail after five months in office, so it must operate under general rules. Here are two possible guidelines that are mutually exclusive:

1) Disclose everything, unless told not to in specific cases;
2) Reveal nothing, except information which is specifically allowed.

Based on its behavior so far—remember the revelation of enhanced interrogation techniques without disclosing the intelligence obtained by said methods?—the Administration is plumping for #2--opacity, secretiveness, and information control. I don’t particularly fault them for that, I just wish they would quit saying that they’re different and better than their predecessors.

(Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds for the pointer.)