Message-ID: <3p2jrj$ss@news.dgsys.com> Date: Sat, 13 May 1995 15:39:31 GMT From: "Future Generations Inc." <mailto:future@DGSYS.COM> Subject: Re: USIA on Internet To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L
Readers of the preceding post may be interested in the following:---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 20:08:48 -0400 From: James Love <mailto:love@Essential.ORG> X-To: Multiple recipients of list <mailto:tap-info@essential.org> Subject: TAP - U.S. Information Agency (USIA)
----------------------------------------------------------------- TAP-INFO - An Internet newsletter available from mailto:listproc@tap.org -----------------------------------------------------------------
TAXPAYER ASSETS PROJECT - INFORMATION POLICY NOTE CROWN JEWELS - US INFORMATION AGENCY April 26, 1995
THE U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY ON THE INTERNET NOT FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS? April 26, 1995 by James Love (202/387-8030; mailto:love@tap.org) (this may be freely disseminated on the Internet)
- Federal Agency with budget of $1.4 billion and 7,600 employees produces television, radio, and text news services for dissemination in foreign countries, but not in U.S.
- In 1994 the USIA launched new Internet services, providing access to the text of news dispatches, and audio feeds from radio programs. These services are provided at various Internet ftp, gopher and World Wide Web sites.
- Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) has reportedly objected to the Internet services, as a violation of the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibits USIA from disseminating information in the United States.
- In response to objections, USIA recently moved large amounts of its WIRLESS FILE text dispatches from the USIA "domestic" gopher (gopher.usia.gov) and Web (www.usia.gov) sites, to other sites with addresses that are "secret" from U.S. citizens. TAP has identified one "foreign" site containing the East Asia/Pacfic WIRELESS FILE text reports (hk.net), a portion of the files that were removed from the "domestic" interest sites.
- The USIA continues to provide access to transcripts and audio files from its Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts from the gopher server, gopher.voa.gov, but the agency claims it cannot tell Americans the URL for the site.
- U.S. citizen access to USIA information is blocked by the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act (22 USC 1461), which prohibits USIA from disseminating information "within the United States, its territories, or possessions," except for limited onsite inspection at USIA offices by members of the press or scholars, or to be "available for examination only to Members of Congress." [The full text of the statutory provision is given below.]
- According to USIA officials, U.S. commercial television and radio interests have lobbied to retain the Smith-Mundt Act restrictions on U.S. citizen access to the information, in order to limit "competition" from this U.S. government information service.
WHAT DOES USIA DO?
The United States Information Agency (USIA) is a $1.4 billion agency employing more than 7,000 persons. It produces a huge array of information products and services. According to the USIA mission statement:
- The Voice of America, the U.S. global radio network, transmits almost 1,000 hours a week of programming in 46 languages to tens of millions of weekly listeners worldwide.
- Radio Marti, established in 1985, broadcasts 24 hours a day in Spanish to Cuba. TV Marti, which began full broadcast operations in August 1990, broadcasts 17-1/2 hours a week to Cuba. The programming consists of news, information and entertainment acquired from a variety of sources.
- USIA's satellite television network, WORLDNET, transmits programs live to foreign audiences through American embassies, USIA posts, and foreign television networks using the latest technology.
- The WIRELESS FILE is a daily text based press service, disseminated in five languages, linked by computerized communication systems to all overseas USIA posts. The Wireless File provides time sensitive information, including full transcripts of speeches, press conferences, Congressional testimony, etc., and texts of published articles and interviews.
- The Agency also produces a number of publications, in both printed and electronic form, dealing with issues of democratic development, market economies, trade, security and other transnational issues.
USIA RESTRICTS U.S. ACCESS TO NEW INTERNET SERVERS
TAP was recently contacted by Peter Ide, an American who now works for a foreign government aid program. Peter had been following the USIA WIRELESS FILE dispatches, which were available on GOPHER.USIA.GOV, searchable by keyword. A few weeks ago the WIRELESS FILE data and other USIA information disappeared from the USIA gopher. After inquiring, Peter received the following letter:
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 95 From: "McGregor, James" <mailto:jmcgrego@usia.gov> Subject: Disappearing USIA Gopher
Mr. Ide,
You received a cryptic message from my colleage Neil Lehrer about the reason for the changes in our Gopher. The "Smith-Mundt" act he referred to is legislation that prohibits USIA from distributing materials intended for overseas audiences within the U.S. We split our servers into an overseas portion (which contained the "latest items") and a domestic version, which is far less interesting but more legal.
I assume from your domain name that you are in the U.S. We are not permitted to give you the address of the server that contains the "latest items" and other material you saw in the original version. If you are overseas, please let me know.
Regards.
James P. McGregor USIA
Mr. Ide, advised USIA's McGregor that he was working for a foreign government, but failed to obtain the name of the "foreign" internet site from USIA. In an April 25, 1995 email message, Mr. McGregor said:
We are under strict prohibition from giving out the name of the site in the U.S. However, your office in . . . can contact the information section at the U.S. Embassy and get the overseas address. . .
BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE SMITH-MUNDT ACT
TAP contacted USIA staff and reviewed the agency's authorizing statutes to understand the nature of the problem. Under a 1948 statute, known as the "Smith-Mundt" act, (22 USC 1461), USIA is prohibited from disseminating information "within the United States, its territories, or possessions," except for limited onsite inspection at USIA offices by members of the press or scholars, and should be "available for examination only to Members of Congress." The Act makes an exception for "Problems of Communism," and "English Teaching Forum," both of which may be made available through the Government Printing Office. [The full text of the statutory provision is given below.]
There are two current reasons for the dissemination prohibition. First, Congress did not want the USIA to subject the American public to government controlled news broadcasts. Second, commercial broadcasters, who have lobbied to keep the Smith-Mundt Act bar to U.S. dissemination of USIA information in place, do not want competition from a free source of news.
The USIA Internet service began in early 1994. On January 14, 1995, the Washington Post ran an article written by John Schwartz which was critical of the USIA decision to provide information on the Internet, because of the Smith-Mundt Act. Schwartz described the USIA information as "forbidden fruit" or "propaganda," which "has been carefully withheld from Americans lest it brainwash them." Schwartz quoted Carl Malamud of the Internet Multicasting Service as saying:
They're [the USIA] winking at those very fundamental mandates from the U.S. Congress -- Ye shall not do news to the American Public. . . It's important that we understand that cyberspace is part of the real world . . . Just because it's on a computer, it doesn't mean that the basic rules don't apply.
Schwartz also quoted from an article by former FCC Commissioner Newton Minow and Annenberg Fellow Alvin Snyder, whom expressed support for eliminating the legal barrier to dissemination of USIA information to U.S. citizens.
Shouldn't we have the opportunity to know what the United States is saying to people in Bosnia, Russia or South America . . . Yesterday's fear that such programs will 'brainwash' the American public is senseless. We get a steady stream of government views in speeches, briefings and press releases, and we are capable of reaching our own conclusions.
According to USIA officials, after the Washington Post article appeared, Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the chair of the Senator Foreign Relations committee, began to press the agency to rein in the Internet program. Senator Helms is also said to favor the elimination of many USIA services, to be replaced by the private sector. Senator Helms' office indicated that Foreign Relations Committee staffer, Chris Walker, is working on this issue. Mr. Walker did not return telephone calls from TAP.
USIA WIRELESS FILE DISPATCHES ON THE INTERNET (at least for now, if you can find them)
Mr. Ide, using standard Internet searching tools, later identified hk.net as one gopher site which provides access to the East Asia/Pacific WIRELESS FILE, from the American Consulate General in Hong Kong. The data are only a subset of that which had been previously available from gopher.usia.gov. We assume that other sites contain additional files.
USIA was created to present a distinctly "official" view of the news, and is clearly designed to promote U.S. foreign policy objectives, but much of the reporting is quite impressive. TAP looked at samples of the April 24, 1995 dispatches. The story "CLINTON SEEKS INCREASED FEDERAL POWER TO COUNTER TERRORISM" contains a 3,504 word verbatim transcript of President Clinton's interview for the CBS-TV show 60 Minutes, from April 23, 1995. In the April 24, 1995 story, "OKLAHOMA BOMBING: TERRORISM, 'MADE IN THE USA' (World Opinion Roundup)", USIA distributed a 2,958 word article providing excerpts from news and editorial reports from 31 foreign countries. The article, "SHATTUCK SEES REASONS FOR ENCOURAGEMENT, CONCERN IN INDONESIA, (Transcript: Press conf. by U.S. human rights official)" is a 4,082 word report of an April 20, 1995 news conference by Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck, held at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta.
USIA NEW INTERNET RADIO SERVICE FOR VOICE OF AMERICA (VOA) BROADCASTS
In addition to the WIRELESS FILE dispatches, USIA has also launched a new Internet radio service that allows persons to download audio files containing Voice of America radio broadcasts in several languages, including english. According to a USIA news release, posted on the "domestic" gopher.usia.gov.
...sound is our native medium, as radio broadcasters, and the new audio service is especially exciting to us because it breaks the language barrier. Newscasts are available in Arabic, Cantonese, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Ukrainian and, of course, English. The programs are transmitted as analog signals along a wire that connects VOA Master Control to our computer machine room, where they are digitized and installed on the public server in three different formats -- at least one of which should be digestible by almost any computer that is capable of playing digital sound. We offer two newscasts a day in most of the languages, one in the morning (local time for the target audience) and one in the evening. Newscasts from VOA's "Worldwide English" program thread, which follows the sun (i.e., on a morning cycle and an evening cycle) are recorded almost every hour.
The Voice of America is the first international broadcaster to offer an audio service on anything approaching this scale and the response from "the Net" has been encouraging. During the two weeks following the inaugural of the new service, users in 29 countries "downloaded" (stored on their own computers) more than 4,000 newscasts in all 15 languages. That is, of course, a metaphorical drop in the proverbial bucket: we currently estimate that 92 million people listen to VOA's direct broadcasts every week, and many more people hear our programs on affiliated local stations.
TAP contacted the Voice of America (VOA) to ask where the Internet Radio broadcasts are located, and was told "I can't legally give you that information." Taking a wild guess, I tried gopher.voa.gov, which was indeed the "secret" VOA gopher address. And, true to life, it contains a number of files that can be downloaded and played using fairly standard multimedia tools. For example, files are storied in Microsoft windows .wav formats, compressed using pkzip. The VOA gopher also includes a number of english language text stories, although these are short, because they are written for radio. I found several brief but interesting articles on the recent french election.
I later received a fax from someone at VOA who apparently had not been informed to keep this information secret. The fax contained the address of the voa gopher and ftp site (the ftp site is ftp.voa.gov), as well as an email address, mailto:info@voa.gov, for instructions on how to receive some text files by electronic mail. I also found gopher.voa.gov from links at many official government Internet sites, such as the White House and Library of Congress World Wide Web servers, suggesting that the location of the audio files and text from VOA radio shows isn't much of a secret.
The more indepth and more unique WIRELESS FILE reports remain quite difficult to locate, however, now that they have been removed from gopher.usia.gov. (Indeed, if you find additional regional sites, please let us know.)
THE TAP VIEW
Few Americans are aware that as taxpayers they are spending $1.4 billion per year to produce news, public affairs and entertainment programming for radio, television and print publications that the government cannot disseminate to its own citizens.
Even before the Internet, American citizens were free to obtain USIA information from overseas sources, shortwave radio frequencies or satellite feeds, and use it as they saw fit. The Internet makes it technically much more difficult to restrict U.S. citizen access to USIA information.
Lawyers consulted by TAP believe that the Smith-Mundt Act prohibitions, which were written long before the Internet existed, may be unconstitutional if challenged today.
The world has changed greatly since 1948, and there can be little fear that access to USIA dispatches, which are available to everyone else in the world, present a danger to our democracy. The USIA information is plainly presented as a product of the United States Government, and there is an avalanche of news and public affairs programming competing for our attention. Many of the WIRELESS FILES dispatches are very interesting reports on topics that are rarely reported in such detail by general interest commercial news organizations. We found the selection of topics and editorial point of view to be an interesting and important perspective on official U.S. foreign policy, particularly when examining the regional reports. Indeed, we find it astounding that Americans cannot receive copies of transcipts of Voice of America broadcasts, WIRELESS FILE dispatches or other materials the goverment is disseminating throughout the world, in order to find out what views our government is presenting to the outside world.
In our view, U.S. citizens should have ready access to the WIRELESS FILE dispatches, transcriptions and audio files from Voice of America Broadcasts, and other USIA information products. Indeed, we hope to someday see an Internet server with several years of backfiles of WIRELESS FILES, VOA transcriptions and other USIA publications, searchable by key word.
To express your views on this issue, write to the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A list of members, and their telephone and fax numbers, can be obtained through the essential.org gopher site.
jamie love (202/387-8030; mailto:love@tap.org)
STATUTORY LANGUAGE PREVENTING DISSEMINATION OF USIA INFORMATION IN THE UNITED STATES
Here is the statutory language which prohibits the USIA from disseminating information in the United States (obtained from the GPO Access version of the U.S. Code.)
[wais.access.gpo.gov] [Laws in effect as of January 24, 1994] [Document not affected by Public Laws enacted between January 24, 1994 and January 3, 1995] [CITE: 22USC1461]
TITLE 22--FOREIGN RELATIONS AND INTERCOURSE CHAPTER 18--UNITED STATES INFORMATION AND EDUCATIONAL EXCHANGE PROGRAMS SUBCHAPTER IV--PARTICIPATION BY GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
Sec. 1461. General authorization
(a) Dissemination of information abroad The Director is authorized, when he finds it appropriate, to provide for the preparation, and dissemination abroad, of information about the United States, its people, and its policies, through press, publications, radio, motion pictures, and other information media, and through information centers and instructors abroad. Subject to subsection (b) of this section, any such information (other than ``Problems of Communism'' and the ``English Teaching Forum'' which may be sold by the Government Printing Office) shall not be disseminated within the United States, its territories, or possessions, but, on request, shall be available in the English language at the Agency, at all reasonable times following its release as information abroad, for examination only by representatives of United States press associations, newspapers, magazines, radio systems, and stations, and by research students and scholars, and, on request, shall be made available for examination only to Members of Congress.
(b) Dissemination of information within United States
(1) The Director of the United States Information Agency shall make available to the Archivist of the United States, for domestic distribution, motion pictures, films, videotapes, and other material prepared for dissemination abroad 12 years after the initial dissemination of the material abroad or, in the case of such material not disseminated abroad, 12 years after the preparation of the material. (2) The Director of the United States Information Agency shall be reimbursed for any attendant expenses. Any reimbursement to the Director pursuant to this subsection shall be credited to the applicable appropriation of the United States Information Agency. (3) The Archivist shall be the official custodian of the material and shall issue necessary regulations to ensure that persons seeking its release in the United States have secured and paid for necessary United States rights and licenses and that all costs associated with the provision of the material by the Archivist shall be paid by the persons seeking its release. The Archivist may charge fees to recover such costs, in accordance with section 2116(c) of title 44. Such fees shall be paid into, administered, and expended as part of the National Archives Trust Fund.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(Jan. 27, 1948, ch. 36, title V, Sec. 501, 62 Stat. 9; July 13, 1972, Pub. L. 92-352, title II, Sec. 204, 86 Stat. 494; 1977 Reorg. Plan No. 2, Secs. 5, 7(a)(1), 42 F.R. 62461, 91 Stat. 1636, 1637; Aug. 15, 1979, Pub. L. 96-60, title II, Sec. 208, 93 Stat. 401; Feb. 16, 1990, Pub. L. 101-246, title II, Sec. 202, 104 Stat. 49.)
Amendments
1990--Pub. L. 101-246 designated existing provisions as subsec. (a), substituted ``Subject to subsection (b) of this section, any such information'' for ``Any such information'' in second sentence, and added subsec. (b). 1979--Pub. L. 96-60 substituted `` `Problems of Communism' and the `English Teaching Forum' which may be sold'' for `` `Problems of Communism' which may continue to be sold'' in parenthetical clause. 1972--Pub. L. 92-352 substituted provisions relating to the prohibition, except as otherwise provided, on the dissemination of information within the United States, its territories, or possessions, other than ``Problems of Communism'' which could continue to be sold at the Government Printing Office, for provisions relating to the availability of press release or radio scripts for examination by representatives of United States press associations, newspapers, magazines, radio systems, and stations, and, on request, Members of Congress.
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