The Sunshine Project
Biosafety Bites (v.2) #15 (15 August 2006)

 

Al-Qaeda Plot Suspected on University of North Carolina Biolab
IBC Blunders Reveal Ignorance, Secrecy, Confusion

Which blunder is more embarrassing?

A) The willfully ignorant e-mail in which the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill's general counsel conjures up imaginary links between Al-Qaeda and the Sunshine Project and uses the product of her fertile, xenophobic imagination to justify removing banal detail from public records, or;

B) The handiwork of her counterpart at East Carolina University (ECU) who, enforcing UNC and ECU's own quack "biosecurity" standard, blacked out line upon line of records, even entire pages, all the while not noticing that his bold strokes became transparent when they dried?

Whichever is more pathetic, the two North Carolina universities have provided a window into the confused and frequently ignorant world of schools improvising "biosecurity" measures when responding to requests for their Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) minutes. Almost five years after the mushrooming of the biodefense budget, UNC and ECU illustrate how schools are a disaster when it comes to meaningful security, while using the excuse of biosecurity to deny citizens information to which they are legally entitled.

It began as normal. In late April, the Sunshine Project received a thick package from ECU in response a request for its IBC minutes. At first glance, the minutes appeared to be heavily redacted (blacked-out). This drew our attention. What, at this not particularly distinguished public university, merited such secrecy?

Closer examination revealed that the black ink was see-through. And behind the first set of minutes, we found a completely unexpurgated copy. It didn't stop there. Behind the unmolested minutes, ECU attached internal correspondence and an exchange between ECU and UNC lawyers about the Sunshine Project and editing IBC minutes. Ooops.

Responding to an ECU query, UNC's Assistant General Counsel explained her institution's reasoning behind redacting its own minutes. Referring to Sunshine Project Advisory Committee members from Africa and Asia or to staff from Colombia (we're not sure which), she wrote:

"What kind of worried me about the request was that some of the people on the [Sunshine Project] board were from foreign countries where there had been terrorist cells found, or where I think I remember some assertion by the feds that some rebel group in the country was allied with Al-Quaeda [sic]."

UNC told ECU that it "deleted the names of a few bugs/toxins that the researchers were working on--they weren't necessarily select agents but some stuff we'd just as soon terrorists didn't know we had around." ... as if that act of redaction provided biosecurity. That same information is public in other circumstances, such as the places it can be found in UNC professor's publications, websites, NIH records, etc... so what is the point of blacking it out? UNC and ECU apparently didn't waste any time thinking about the question.

In applying their bogus and quite possibly illegal, "I think I remember some assertion" test to their public records requestor, it did not, apparently, occur to the UNC or ECU attorneys that people in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Germany, France, and many other "safe" countries would also fail. Nor did they stop to ponder why, if the putative Al-Qaeda link was true, the Sunshine Project would abundantly advertise its intention of acquiring IBC minutes from as many institutions as possible.

Instead of thinking clearly and acting responsibly, the UNC counsel showed an appalling disregard for, or perhaps ignorance of, basic concepts of open records law, under which what is public is public, and what is released does not vary according the institution's perception of the requester, even if that perception is an apparently paranoid and definitely xenophobic fantasy. There is also nothing to suggest that UNC or ECU did anything to investigate if there was any reality to their fantasies about terrorists asking for IBC minutes.

Applied Biosecurity: What got Blacked-Out?

Reading through (literally) ECU's redactions, we were stuck by how much insipid and utterly ordinary information was removed in the name of biosecurity. In drafts, they went further, pondering redacting all information about research on herpes virus, as if the US was threatened by terrorist cold sores.

Frequently mystifying, little rational reason can be discerned for how ECU picked what text to redact. Withheld from the public are items such as "Please refer to Addendum to Biological Safety Policy in the Agenda Packet", along with "No glass will be used in the lab", and "Conclusions: The registration was passed." Another typically vapid item denied in the name of biosecurity: "A keyboard cover will need to be installed on the computer."

Clearly, America will cower if such information ever falls into the hands of Al-Qaeda.

In the name of biosecurity, the comment "Misc. Typeo's [sic] in the document" was blacked-out, as if bearded bombers were threatening to pass judgment on ECU's spelling.

But the ECU IBC flaunted its command of technical terminology by releasing the following: "Would a vortex or a homonognizer be better than the mortor and pedestile? [sic]" Those and many other errors give reason to wonder if any ECU IBC member has ever actually read the allegedly security-sensitive minutes that the committee adopts at each meeting.

In a few cases, ECU's motive is clearer. A paragraph discussing the University's malfunctioning waste incinerator was completely blotted out. This "biosecurity" redaction was more likely an attempt to avoid embarrassment and/or uncomfortable compliance questions about ECU's attempt to improvise a solution for the serious design flaw in its equipment.

In three years of IBC minutes, there is only one mention of select agent research. The Brucella project is documented in public NIH records and by ECU's website, for example, here. This apparently didn't occur to ECU when it blotted reference to Brucella out of its minutes.

The circumstances of the single mention of Brucella suggest an alternative motive for trying to hide the manifestly public fact that ECU handles the select agent. There was an accident. It came in 2003, when a splashed brucella-containing liquid in an ECU BSL-3 lab caused an exposure to the bacteria. The minutes provide no further detail, but note that a new Brucella exposure policy was adopted. Even this rudimentary information, however, would have been unavailable to the public if the redactions had been made competently.

Who's to Blame?

UNC and ECU deserve to be called out for their disreputable behavior in assessing and responding to Sunshine Project requests for IBC minutes. They are willfully thwarting the public's right to know based on groundless suspicions that they did not apparently even bother to test.

But the situation also calls attention to the federal government, specifically the National Institutes of Health Office of Biotechnology Activities (NIH OBA) and the Centers for Disease Control Select Agent Program (CDC SAP). Although these offices oversee IBCs and select agents, respectively, there is essentially a complete absence of any useful and correct guidance to IBCs from them. (Presuming, for the moment, that IBCs would follow it.)

The vacuum created by the lack of federal policy plays a key role. It was, after all, the UNC lawyer's vague recollection of a possible federal assertion that enabled her to detect, however preposterously, a possible Al-Qaeda plot on UNC's biological materials (... a suspicion that UNC and ECU apparently and paradoxically did not convey to the federal authorities, who certainly do want to know about illicit efforts to acquire select agents, although obviously, in this case, it was merely a fantasy).

Useful direction on transparency from the federal government would, if properly done, clarify that the vast, vast majority of IBC materials are not sensitive information. This, in turn, would engender the beneficial effects of transparency, better judgment, and increased safety.

Universities and other research institutes are being offered big money to study biological weapons agents and are being told it is a matter of national security. In the absence of any useful federal support for freedom of information, however, school officials too often default to imagining themselves as protagonists in a Tom Clancy thriller, dodging bullets in the form of information requests and protecting their intelligence assets, like the fact that the computer keyboard needs a dust cover. These ignorant and kooky ideas about biosecurity, fabricated in the federal vacuum, only harm the public and the true long-term national interest in international confidence in US biomedical research. And more sinisterly, they can provide an excuse to cover up safety problems, such as a Brucella accident, and avoid assigning accountability, such as for faulty major equipment (like an incinerator).