[600] in peace2
Fwd: Bush administration fires scientist for posting maps of
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Rios)
Tue Mar 20 17:07:20 2001
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Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 17:06:00 -0500
To: dakogan@students.uiuc.edu, kstinchcombe@hotmail.com, beavis132@hotmail.com,
bridgesrr@hotmail.com, trish_rios@hotmail.com, lisanjoey@yahoo.com,
jacque@mit.edu, peace-list@mit.edu, pika <in-house-pikans@mit.edu>,
nutso-flaming-pikans@mit.edu, jupiter827@hotmail.com, bobdobbs@mit.edu
From: Marc Rios <mrios@MIT.EDU>
An ignorant populace can't complain. New fiasco from the Bush administration.
-Marc
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>Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 16:57:07 -0500 (EST)
>From: rhodes@alum.mit.edu (Bradley Rhodes)
>To: eit@tep.org
>Subject: Bush administration fires scientist for posting maps of Alaska on web
>Reply-To: rhodes@alum.mit.edu
>
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>FYI: Please CC any return email to
>mailto:free_world_maps@hotmail.com
>
>Please feel free to forward this email to other lists and media contacts!
>
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>Hi All,
>
>Well, I have been fired for posting to the internet a single web page
>with some maps showing the distribution of caribou calving areas in
>the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
>
>My entire website http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/ has now
>been removed from the internet. This represents about 3 years
>worth of work and 20,000 plus maps showing bird, mammal and amphibian
>distributions, satellite imagery, landcover and vegetation maps
>for countries and protected areas all around of the globe. As far
>as I am aware it was one of the biggest collections of maps online
>and certainly the biggest collection showing maps of biodiversity
>and the environment. The website was often visited by over a thousand
>visitors each week. In addition, I was fulfilling roughly a dozen
>requests for geospatial data and information from colleagues, other
>researchers and the general public each day.
>
>All of this comes as a rather big surprise to me. I was given no
>chance to remove the webpage or even finish writing an appeal before
>my position was terminated. I was working under a contract so I
>believe I have very little legal recourse. I have received no written
>explanation (or even an email) stating the exact reasons for the
>termination decision and I understand that even though this would
>be a reasonable courtesy to expect, it is unlikely to be forthcoming.
>
>>From my viewpoint my dismissal was a high-level political decision to
>set an example to other Federal scientists. I base this belief on the
>following information I received from a colleague in Alaska who is a
>leading researcher on the issues involved:
>
>"I really hope you don't get fired. In fact, had the timing of what
>you did not been so inappropriate based on everything else that was
>going on, I doubt that anyone would have noticed. Your work showed a
>lot of initiative..."
>
>"...the fallout would not have been so great had the subject matter
>not been one of the three USDOI super hot topics with the new
>administration and had we not been briefing the Secretary at the
>nearly exact time your website went up. Everyone is nervous and
>as I mentioned earlier, consistency in presentation is paramount."
>
>So now, I believe my only recourse is to appeal to the general public
>in the hope that in the future what just happened to me will not
>happen to others.
>
>I would recommend anybody in a similar circumstances to contact the
>fine people at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility
>(http://www.peer.org) or a similar organization.
>
>The response and support I have received from friends online has been
>truely amazing. I very much appreciate how quickly people have acted
>on my behalf and helped publicize my plight and I especially wish
>to thank the international mapping community...receiving letters of
>support from far away places cheers me up no end. Please feel free
>to forward this email to other lists and media contacts! I would also
>be grateful if anybody who misses all the maps I put on the internet
>please contact the USGS to let them know and to ask that the maps be
>reposted.
>
>I feel very bad that these events are also affecting my colleagues at
>Patuxent. Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing researchers
>and everybody I worked with is very supportive.
>
>Many, many thanks for your support,
>
>Ian Thomas free_world_maps@hotmail.com
>
>The Details:
>
>Nobody instructed/authorized me to post the web pages on Arctic
>National Wildlife Refuge. It was done on my own initiative. I was
>working on land cover maps for all National Wildlife Refuges using the
>new National Landcover Datasets. Last week I published over 1000 land
>cover maps online covering every National Wildlife Refuge and National
>Park in the lower 48. (These maps have now been removed from the
>internet too). Similar land cover data for Alaska were not available
>but the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had a good landcover map so I
>included it.
>
>In the past, I helped produce the only set of maps online showing all
>bird species distributions in Alaska. In addition I have produced
>online mammal distribution atlases of Africa, maps for tigers in
>asia and I was working on digitizing North American mammal range maps
>produced by the Smithsonian Institution.
>
>I have also been conducting background research to prepare proposals
>to study the effects of mineral extraction on biodiversity and
>protected areas on a very large scale. One such proposal that I was
>preparing would have looked at exporting analysis and mapping methods
>applied in the United States to other regions of the World such as
>Africa. The proposal was co-sponsored by the Mineral Division of USGS
>and the World Resources Institute.
>
>The migration of caribou in North America is the closest thing
>that we have to the great mammal migrations that occur in Africa.
>African protected areas are also under great pressure from possible
>development for mineral extraction. So the carribou distributions
>that I found on the Fish and Wildlife Service public website were
>of particular interest. I have also worked for several years on maps
>of migratory bird distribution patterns. I therefore have a great
>interest in other migratory animals as many of the temporal mapping
>problems are similar.
>
>I was completely unaware that there was anything wrong with publishing
>ANWR maps. I have never been informed of any agency restrictions or
>any other guidelines on publishing maps depicting ANWR...I only now
>have been informed that there is a two week old agency "communications
>directive" that limits who is allowed to distribute new information on
>ANWR within my agency.
>
>I thought that I was helping further public and scientific
>understanding and debate of the issues at ANWR by making some clearer
>maps. I also hoped that colleagues in USGS would see the maps and
>then contact me if they needed additional mapping help. I was careful
>to quote my sources and explain what I had done. I made no statement
>about what the maps might mean with regard to oil development of the
>refuge.
>
>The web pages were put up on Wednesday, March 7, last week. The first
>thing I did when I put the ANWR pages up on the internet was to inform
>other USGS Biological Resources Division mapping people and other
>agency (Fish Wildlife Service and National Park Service respectively)
>GIS people through email that they were on the web. Informing other
>Federal colleagues and agencies immediately upon publication to the
>web appears to me to be the only reasonable review process available,
>seeing as there is no internal review website currently available
>... I have never been informed of any other established proceedure
>for review of web content on our site. I actually haven't had any
>complaints about or requests to change any other map on my website...
>
>I assumed that if anybody had a problem they could contact me directly
>and quickly and appropriate steps could be taken almost immediately.
>I received one warning from a colleague that the maps I put on the
>internet should be removed. Unfortunately, it was sent on Saturday
>so I did not receive it in time. I think the decision to terminate me
>was taken before I even got to work on Monday.
>
>I also assumed that because all I was doing was esentially presenting
>existing public information in a clearer and improved format,
>there was very little need for any extensive review other than the
>steps I took. Indeed the changes that I made to the original Fish
>and Wildlife Service (FWS) web maps were simply to digitize them
>("trace"), then overlay them on satellite and vegetation maps and then
>summarize how may years specific areas were a high density caribou
>calving area. I found a similar (poor quality) summary map on the FWS
>website that allowed me to check the accuracy of my simple analysis.
>
>I was unaware that FWS had updated the data. There is no mention of
>updated information on the FWS website. This new data has still to be
>made public. If my maps were inaccurate in any way so are the public
>FWS maps I copied.... (please refer to
>http://www.r7.fws.gov/nwr/arctic/pchmap2.html#section6)
>
>I think that over the last three years I have put more maps up on the
>internet (at a guess approaching 20,000 to 30,000 static individual
>maps) equalling any other website on the world wide web. So out of
>the tens of thousands of maps (and hours) I finally publish one that
>got me fired....I suppose the odds were going to run out eventually....
>
>I am concerned that other Federal researchers may easily make the same
>mistakes I just made and should learn from my example what happens if
>you're not careful.
>
>Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing researchers and
>everybody I worked with is very supportive.
>
>Ian Thomas
>
>Former Mapping Specialist at the:
>GIS & Remote Sensing Unit
>Biological Resources Division
>United States Geological Survey
>Patuxent Wildlife Research Center
>
>Old Homepage (no longer available)
>http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/home.html
>
>The Global Environmental Atlas (no longer available)
>http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/geotech/cindi/world.html
>
>
>------- end of forwarded message -------
>
>--
>Bradley Rhodes
>Intelligence Augmentation | Software Agents | Wearable Computing
>http://www.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/
>
