Read It Again, Uncle Sam

We all do things in college that we grow up to regret. In an age of information, the indulgences of our formative years are more likely than ever to resurface in our later lives. The list of risky endeavors is a long one—experimenting with drugs, behaving promiscuously, writing inflammatory editorials, and so on. That said, one generally presumes that there is a short roster of activities in which one ought to be able to participate without fear of consequences. Academic inquiry belongs on that list, right? I thought so too. But as a number of academics are now learning, the U.S. government tends to disagree.

A number of Canada’s largest universities have lately questioned the security of their U.S.-based online research tools because of the government’s power to comb individuals’ citation records for hints of collusion with any of America’s numerous enemies. One service in particular, RefWorks, has been the subject of scrutiny; Canadian academics are taking their personal accounts out of the California-based firm’s hands in spades, opting instead for a server at the University of Toronto, according to The Globe and Mail.

Repatriating one’s search records is kind of like wrapping one’s head in tinfoil and running for the border. Beyond the Bush administration’s gaze and shrouded in Canada’s more privacy-friendly (and, perhaps, terrorist-friendly) institutions, a scholar can only hope against hope that research in apparently fringe subjects like nuclear proliferation and Islam won’t lead to her becoming the subject of a (secret) investigation.

But after hordes of Canuck researchers retreated to my frigid homeland, the rest of us will be left mired in a pretty serious dilemma. As Harvard prepares to inaugurate the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, the University will have to answer a fundamental question—when researchers stand to make massive contributions to knowledge in areas that are the subject of controversy, to what extent is it incumbent on us to shield them from the prying eyes of the government?

It has always been the case that cutting-edge academic work comes with a built-in payload of controversy, often with political implications. But unlike their colleagues who work with stem cells, social scientists who investigate things like Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation (not to mention a treasure trove of combinations thereof), are increasingly finding themselves looking down the barrel of the U.S. government’s homeland security apparatus.

The potential consequences are fearsome. As The New York Times reported, the Patriot Act, renewed by Congress in March, empowers the FBI to demand individuals’ private information from doctors’ offices, banks, and libraries without a judge’s consent, using “national security letters,” which carry with them a “gag rule,” that prevents recipients from discussing the letters with anyone but their lawyers. (Those investigated can challenge this gag rule.) For researchers using services like RefWorks, the potential hazard is that their academic work could be red-flagged and investigated without their knowledge.

Americans face a very different set of circumstances with respect to having their work surveyed than do their Canadian colleagues. For one thing, academics in this country have nowhere to hide—even if Harvard were to move all of its users’ personal information from sites like RefWorks to servers in Canada, the Patriot Act still enables the FBI to demand that librarians and Internet service providers surrender user records.

And unless Harvard’s librarians were to have the guts to challenge the constitutionality of “national security letters” in court—as four Connecticut librarians recently did, persisting long enough for the FBI to drop first the gag rule and then the information request altogether—we seem to be stuck in a situation where we will remain uncertain about the privacy of our research. Every member of the Harvard community, from part-time undergraduates to tenured faculty, has cause for concern. There is nothing more unsavory than the concept of honest academic inquiry being the cause of an individual’s being investigated, and, insofar as current research is concerned, those from whom we most stand to gain, have the most to lose.

The argument in favor of the Patriot Act’s surveillance provisions is that not subjecting private records to scrutiny creates a safe haven for ne’er-do-wells and that those who are doing nothing wrong have nothing to fear. But it strikes me as absurd, and even somewhat insulting to the investigative talents of FBI agents, to suggest that the government needs to compromise civil rights in order to catch the terrorists in our midst.

With a plethora of other tools at its disposal, why does the FBI need to lurk in the shadows, peering over the shoulders of this country’s researchers? I don’t recall the last time an act of terrorism was perpetrated with the help of LexisNexis. Unless the Patriot Act presumes to also prevent plagiarism, the only thing the FBI’s snooping at Harvard seems likely to prevent is academics feeling safe in conducting their own research, particularly in fields that are rightly becoming the focus of new expansion of the University’s academic horizons.

The hazards of working on the frontier of knowledge are intense without the Patriot Act’s help. By creating a culture of fear in academic circles, the deep probing powers given to investigators by the act allowed them to present us with the most crippling hindrance to academic freedom imaginable. And as Canadians head to the hills with their private information, it might be time for those of us who do research in this country to start feeling more than a little uneasy.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears regularly.