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Updated Monday, November 16, 2009 10:26 am TWN, By Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

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Lift the security cloud over Jet Propulsion Lab

If the investigators turned up anything they felt disqualified somebody, there was no provision for appeal. Anyone who refused to sign the waiver was to be fired.

Less than 10 percent of the work carried out at JPL involves classified science, and the employees working on those projects are covered by the government's security clearance system.

So a group of the civilian scientists and engineers who would have been forced to submit to the Bush/Cheney inquisition sued in federal court, arguing that Directive 12 violated their right to privacy by requiring disclosure of personal information utterly unrelated to their work. As planetary scientist Robert Nelson, the lead plaintiff in the suit, told me last week, “If you do classified work, of course you need a clearance, but we don't do that sort of science. ... We only object to the irrational and illegal intrusion into our personal lives.”

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately found merit in the suit's objections and, last year, halted imposition of the presidential directive on the lab. There matters remained, and the plaintiffs hoped that the Obama administration would let the matter die. Last week, however — just five minutes before the government's right to appeal the 9th Circuit ruling would have expired — Solicitor General Elena Kagan asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

Kagan argues that the government does not violate the right to privacy by collecting information on an individual, only by disseminating it. Further, she contends that the 9th Circuit's ruling threatens the whole regulation of the civil service. Both contentions are patent nonsense.

As civil rights attorney Dan Stormer, the plaintiffs' lead counsel, told me, “Why an administration supposedly committed to due process and to protecting individual rights would seek this hearing is just inexplicable.”

Back at JPL, Nelson was busy posting on the Internet exciting new photos that may show active volcanoes on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. It's all part of his and others' work on the Cassini space probe.

This generation's great work of exploration is proceeding thanks to their scientific skill. President Barack Obama can ensure that it continues by withdrawing Kagan's ill-considered appeal or rewriting Directive 12. Either step will do; extension of the national security state into JPL will not.

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