The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, whoever governments probably all have a complete copy. The only ones this is gonna hurt is ourselves.

"Export control", just like DRM, deprives good citizens from the ideas of their own peers, while still allowing malicious types with connections and know-how to have the controlled ideas anyway.

Both forms of idea control fight a smarter enemy...by making non-enemies even dumber.

I wonder how much money has been wasted discussing this, making it happen, and how much money will be wasted reviewing the documents. I am glad sequestration hasn't done anything to impair congresses ability to waste money.

Even if that's true, it doesn't make McCarthy right. In this country, the government isn't allowed to prosecute people for their political beliefs. The problem with McCarthy wasn't just that there was a witch hunt in place. The problem was that if every single person he accused to be a communist was indeed a communist, the proper response is, "so what?"

That doesn't necessarily justify his policies.
Is there any prohibition against Communists being in the State Department?
Espousing a certain socio-economic or political viewpoint isn't illegal, nor does it disqualify one from employment at the State Department.

Of course there is - it's in Beijing. We just don't have access to it, nor do we have access to the original anymore.

The (Party-State) thing is pretty common for both parties, especially when talking about someone less known. If I were writing about Dick Cheney or Barack Obama or something, I wouldn't put it there, but if we're talking about regular Congresscritters, it seems like useful information to know their party affiliation and where they come from.

If you're seeing a pattern, perhaps rather than a conspiracy, it's simply that one party is attacking science more than the other one is, at least lately?

I don't see how taking down an archive of publicly available documents, many of which have been publicly available for decades, is reasonably related to someone stealing documents that aren't publicly available.

Much of the kind of information on NTRS (the recent stuff that would be a valid export control concern, not the historic archive--which while useful seems to be a much less reasonable concern--"OMG the durn commies might find out about Republic's failed proposal for the X-15") is also available in published journals, or in multiple independent online archives/cache's...just NTRS provides easy access without a paywall and at one place.

Of course the end result is that those of us who are funded by NASA and find NTRS useful in are day jobs end up spending three times as long to find the information we need (guess it's time to renew those AIAA, AAS, IEEE journal subscriptionsor go to a technical library). BUT, if the Chinese accidentally delete their copy of NASA TN D-683 and all their backups, now we'll force them to walk to a librarythat's sure to slow down their rocket program.

I have no doubt that in an archive that size/scope, there might of been somethings that slipped through, but everything I've had published over the years has had to go through an export review process before it would even be accepted for NTRS.

This is just stupid.

If McCarthy was right it was entirely by accident. Many innocent people were smeared as Communists simply for advocating policies that McCarthy personally disagreed with. Among the many was George Marshall, the man responsible for the Marshall Plan and thus one of the people most responsible for saving Western Europe from a Communist takeover. The character of the McCarthy-like senator in "The Manchurian Candidate" is uncomfortably close to the truth.

To be fair, I myself have seen the horrors and bloodshed of Capitalism up close and personal in the United States of Amerika.

On another note, I have been screwed a lot more by Big Business than by Big Government.

Yes and she left for a better place where her speech would not be suppressed ... how sad that she eventually forgot such notions and then suppressed the speech of those who opposed her ... of course, she was all about hypocrisy as she didn't appear to be above utilizing social programs ...

Once the oppressed now the oppressor ...

I don't agree with the Communists, and I don't agree with the Tea Party. I don't want to prevent either of them from being in positions in government, however. Other than by not voting for them, that is. If other people vote them in, that's their right, because I do believe in a representative government.

The line, by the way, isn't whether your political beliefs include violent overthrow of the U.S. government. It's when your actions support that. The moment you take up arms and try to force the government out and put your own government in place, I expect you to be shot down and arrested. I'm not going to support the government going after you for pre- or thought-crime, though.

Does the phrase "absurd knee-jerk overreaction" ring a bell?

The panic spasms of a bureaucracy discovering they've facilitated espionage are so powerful you could probably do pinch-confinement fusion in their rectums.

This is usually referred to as closing the barn door after the horse gets out.

Maybe some other country will post the reports so we can have access to them.