Lift the security cloud over Jet Propulsion Lab

From the great Age of Discovery forward, men had claimed territories previously unknown for their guilds, companies and nations. The race to the moon was born of the brutal competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for pre-eminence in every field of endeavor, but the moment of victory transformed America's vision of its heroic triumph. From then on, a free people living in an open society would make the most fundamental benefits of space exploration mankind's common patrimony. That expression of liberty's altruism was the real glory of that first lunar expedition — and of all the great unmanned voyages of planetary exploration that have followed.

Those great adventures are run from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, just north of downtown Los Angeles. And for that reason, when history comes to honor the starting points from which our greatest enterprises of discovery have set out, it will reckon JPL's quiet, green campus alongside the courts of Castile and Henry the Navigator, the Dutch Republic and Elizabethan London.

At least it will unless the Obama administration succeeds in completing President George W. Bush's reckless and wasteful attempt to impose a Draconian new security regimen on JPL's civilian scientists and engineers, a step that not only would infringe their rights to privacy but subvert the lab's role as one of the foremost centers of open science.

This problem began in the Bush/Cheney administration's hysterical response to 9/11. Presidential Directive 12, issued by the then-new Department of Homeland Security, ordered federal agencies to adopt a uniform badge that could be used by employees and contractors to gain access to government facilities. NASA demanded that the California Institute of Technology, which operates JPL on the space agency's behalf, require all of the lab's civilian scientists and engineers to sign a waiver allowing federal investigators to ransack their personal lives. The waiver empowered the feds to secretly question ex-husbands and wives, disgruntled neighbors and resentful colleagues about every detail of the subjects' lives.

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