NASA v. The Scientists
A band of space scientists and engineers take their fight for privacy all the way to the Supreme Court.
- By Mark Betancourt
- AirSpaceMag.com, September 24, 2010
A&S
Just weeks before the Supreme Court is due to hear a case that has dominated his life for the past three years—and may affect the lives of thousands of fellow government contractors—Robert Nelson’s thoughts are a billion miles away. “Right now I’m sitting at my desk looking at a spectral image of the surface of Titan,” he says by phone from his office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he’s a planetary astronomer.
Nelson’s role in NASA’s Cassini mission is to pore over data coming back from the probe, which is now in orbit around Saturn. He and his colleagues are investigating evidence that the planet’s largest moon is volcanically active. One of their theories is that ice volcanoes spew a slurry of frozen water and liquid methane onto Titan’s frigid surface.
That’s a normal day for a research scientist at JPL, which is run by the California Institute of Technology. But Nelson is also the lead plaintiff in a case going before the Supreme Court next month. He and 27 of his JPL colleagues are suing NASA, which funds the lab. The question facing the court: whether the federal government has a right to investigate the personal lives of employees who have access to federal facilities, even if they never go near sensitive or classified material.
Nelson’s fellow plaintiffs, who are mostly scientists and engineers, do everything from studying the evolution of galaxies to driving the Mars rovers. For the last three years they and many other JPL employees have split their time between exploring the cosmos and fighting for their constitutional right to privacy.
After a 2004 presidential directive required standardized ID badges for all federal employees and contractors, NASA informed Caltech that it was instituting background checks in order to comply with the new federal requirement. Caltech told its JPL employees that if they didn’t submit to the checks, the university would consider them to have voluntarily resigned from their positions.
The plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case have two problems with the background checks. First, that they have to submit to them at all. Many JPL researchers have been working at the lab for decades. Security has never been an issue, and personal background checks—beyond supplying routine application information and employment verification when they first took their jobs—have never been required before.
“We have no secrets,” says Nelson. “Come out here and I’ll show you my lab notebook, anytime you’d like to see it.”
The second, larger concern is that the background checks are essentially limitless. Third parties like former landlords and employers are encouraged by investigators to provide any information, “derogatory as well as positive,” that they feel might affect the employee’s suitability to work for the government.
Concerned that people they once knew might suddenly have direct influence on their job security, the JPL employees asked NASA how exactly the information would be used. In response, NASA released a “suitability matrix,” which lists “sodomy,” “cohabitation,” “attitude” and “loitering” among the potential factors in considering whether JPL researchers should keep their jobs. NASA refuses to rule out that it might use any part of the matrix to evaluate JPL employees.
When Caltech told its employees to comply with the background checks, Nelson says many of his colleagues were at first indifferent to the additional red tape. “People did not believe that NASA investigators were going to conduct an investigation into their past sexual activity. But when we showed them that that’s exactly what they were signing away, people became more sympathetic.”
Nelson says he and his fellow plaintiffs were initially uncomfortable with the prospect of having to sue their own employers. Previous conflicts between the scientists and management at JPL had never amounted to more than disputes over parking tickets. “Before we filed for a court injunction there was a year of activity where we were discussing and arguing amongst ourselves, and also with the management, to try to figure out a way to bring this problem to a soft landing.”
But the requirement for the background checks remained, and in 2007 the scientists sued NASA, the Department of Commerce and Caltech, citing their right to privacy and their right to keep their jobs while fighting for it. Now, after a volley of appeals from both sides, the case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments in the case on October 5.
Comments (4)
Why on Earth (or in space) is NASA peering into their employees bedrooms?
Because (almost) no one fights back. They could go even farther, and my experience in NASA is that 99% of employees would meekly go along, rather than cause 'trouble'.
When asked after a speech by a cadet engineer what was the single most important attribute a government engineer had to have, retired Admiral Hyman Rickover surprised the assembled with a one-word answer: "Courage". That still stands today. And, unfortunately, it seems to be what many (most?) NASA personnel lack. It also helps explain why so many remained silent as NASA's direction was sent into an un-sustainable direction in the last decade, with nary a peep from anyone on the inside.
Posted by Dave Huntsman on September 24,2010 | 01:09 AM
It all brings back memories of the University of California's Loyalty Oath. One result of that was Berkeley's loss of advanced particle physics to Stanford, and the blacklisting of the Berkeley Department among physicists.
And it's not only contractors. I volunteered -- VOLUNTEERED -- for the national park service, only to be told that they needed to do a background check on me. Including a Credit Report -- why in hell did they need to do a credit report on a volunteer naturalist? It cost me 20 bucks to get the fingerprints done.) That was bad enough...but I just turned down another volunteer position because the new park insisted on doing ANOTHER background check because "our (Chief of Interpretation) likes to do her own checks." Maybe we need an amicus curiae deposition from NPS volunteers.
Posted by Donnld M. Scott on September 25,2010 | 08:37 PM
Suitability matrix? No federal agency that has classified material cares about your sexual preference. It's illegal to grant or decline employment (or by extension, a security clearance when that determines your employment) based on sexual preference. How is it that NASA (dumb as a bag of hammers) thinks they can get away with even ASKING those questions?
I guess that just shows the reason that our space program is a complete joke. Nice going guys! Keep up the good work and soon we'll be the only country WITHOUT a space program. At least, without a government run program. I'm sure the private sector will pick things up quite nicely.
Posted by Seriously? on September 26,2010 | 10:07 AM
It another big step toward fascism in the US. Fascism doesn't have to come via radical change; it can come incrementally as is happening in the US now. Every time a citizen accepts a violation of their rights, they are inviting further violations of their rights.
The so-called "War on Terror" or "Global Struggle Against Terror" has been the facade used for wholesale violation of our rights as citizens. Whether it has done any good in preventing further attacks on the US is questionable since "national security" is invoked any time citizens want to know something other then what is fed to the mass media and then fed to the people.
Posted by thomas mcgovern on September 26,2010 | 05:07 PM