The U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania should remind Americans that terrorists can strike any time, anywhere. But if the Environmental Protection Agency has its way, terrorists may find it easier to strike targets in the U.S.
Sound far-fetched? Actually, it's the law.
Under the 1990 Clean Air Act, U.S. manufacturers are required to disclose the risk of chemical accidents at their facilities. Someone at the EPA had the bright idea that this detailed information from more than 66,000 U.S. plants should be posted on the Internet.
The upshot: Anyone - from competitors to terrorists and industrial spies - will have access to very detailed industrial secrets.
At the very least, any data the EPA posts on the Internet under the "right to know" program could be used by competitors to learn a target firm's costs, technical advances, economic break points, expansion plans, competitive strength, pricing flexibility and efficiency.
But the real danger is in the law's "worst case scenario" provision. That forces companies to disclose what chemicals or hazardous materials could be released and how, as well as the exact amount needed to jeopardize nearby populations.
Not only that, firms must include the topography of the area surrounding their plants as well as the reach and effects of an accident.
The law stops just short of asking companies to draw terrorists a map. But firms must disclose their addresses and factory locations by longitude and latitude, the nature and amount of hazardous materials on site and the number of full-time employees at each location.
Especially helpful for would-be saboteurs: Each firm must draw up an "off-site consequence analysis," to estimate the number of people who would be injured, killed or "affected" by an accidental toxic release.
Although the Clean Air Act specified what has to be disclosed, it said nothing about how it was to be made available. No surprise that the CIA and FBI both oppose the EPA's move to post the information on the World Wide Web. So do Republican leaders in Congress.
"The Internet disclosure plans would provide terrorists with a blueprint for undermining America's infrastructure and would jeopardize our nation's physical security," warned Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., in a letter to EPA Director Carol Browner.
Turns out even the EPA knows of the national security threat, but doesn't seem to mind. A report by an EPA contractor found that putting worst-case scenario data on the Web would raise the risk of terrorism sevenfold and give terrorists the "capability to scan across the country for the best targets."
The EPA's inspector general found that the agency "is not sufficiently protecting its information-technology resources from malicious acts via access from the Internet."
The EPA has a poor record of safeguarding its computer data. The agency recently admitted losing hundreds of confidential business documents - the second such slip-up in two years. Such security lapses only add to concern about leaving the EPA responsible for safeguarding sensitive data.
The EPA's Internet disclosure plan also increases the threat of industrial espionage. The U.S. leads the world both in intellectual property and public disclosure of proprietary business information, making American firms the top target for industrial spies.
Many spying efforts are directed by the intelligence agencies of our trading partners, including China, Germany, France, Japan and Israel. One study found that 57 nations were actively engaged in economic espionage against U.S. companies. And 100 countries were engaged in legally gathering proprietary economic data from U.S. firms.
The White House Office of Science and Technology estimated that losses to U.S. firms from economic espionage are nearly $100 billion annually.
We live in a very different world than we did when the Clean Air Act amendments were passed in '90. That was before terrorists struck at the World Trade Center and the federal building in Oklahoma City. And the expanded right-to-know provisions in the Clean Air Act also predated the explosive growth of the Internet.
Any plan to disclose sensitive data should be done with the approval of intelligence agencies in order to safeguard national security. We must balance the risk of environmental hazards with the threats of terrorism and economic espionage.
William H. Lash III is a distinguished senior fellow of the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis and author of "Giving Away the Store: The Flaws in EPA's Expanded Right to Know Program" (CSAB, August 1998).
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