Why does an organization like NASA have the need to classify documents? Why are their findings not made public immediately?

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Why does an organization like NASA have the need to classify documents? Why are their findings not made public immediately?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

NASA exists to make technology, scientific research and space travel for private US companies even better. Sometimes this means that they have to not tell people about some of their findings so that the right experts from universities can research their findings and release more science ideas. This process is called peer review, and when you don’t do it, the news can make scientific findings sound different than they actually are, which confuses people.

In short, NASA finds facts and sometimes those facts need to be verified and have theories attached before they’re released so research can be better targeted.

Anonymous 0 Comments

**shrug** They do it for a variety of reasons: national security, protecting scientific and technological breakthroughs, guarding their intellectual property, giving permitted peers in the field time to review, verify, and offer conclusions about any research …

Anonymous 0 Comments

For something, it is because it is dual-use technology that in this case is both peaceful and military usage.

So they do not what to give everything away about rockest because North Korea and others could use it in their missile program. So it is a good idea to keep some parts secret.

Another reason is that stuff they use like the Falcon 9 that hopefully will launch astronauts to space tomorrow is a designed owned by a private company Space X that do not like their designs spread around. So NASA reports do not contain confidential information from them.

On the other hand, if you look at the data from science missions in space most of them today have the data public on the web almost directly.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They sometimes directly use military (or ex-military) technology. Hubble is a prime example, being derived partly from cold-war spy satellites, just pointed around away from Earth.

Rockets, too, have technology heavily funded by the military for ballistic missiles.

There’s enough overlap that some discoveries, especially those close to Earth where weapons might be used, have to be checked out for national security reasons.

Further away from Earth, like planetary probes, there should be less of a problem.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They don’t “need” to, it is entirely a political decision. Every facet of our government should be entirely transparent, but we put a lot of authoritarians in power who can’t handle the idea and insist on secrecy. We give them so much power we make it easy. Transparency is hard, but it is the most secure.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Several reasons.

1. The technology might have other uses – a satellite, for example, can be used to spy.

2. They have suppliers who don’t want the technology they own given to competitors. If I design a new kind of rocket for which I own the rights, and I sell it to NASA, I don’t want to show up trying to sell it again next year and be told “sorry dude, great design but Space X didn’t have the development costs, they just copied your design from those documents of yours we posted on the internet – so we are going to buy it from them. They are cheaper.“ NASA, on the other hand, is not going to buy a multimillion dollar product and then be told they cannot review the design for errors or weaknesses, or how to connect it to the rest of the system. So, we put in the contract- you will classify these documents or I will sue your ass from here to Pluto.

3. All designs have weak points – destroying something is always easier than building it – that is the second law of thermodynamics. It is a fundamental principle of reality. And, to be safe, they need to know how it could be destroyed, so they can compensate. As a result, they have reports on that, on everything that could go wrong or could be sabotaged to great effect. They don’t want some terrorist downloading those reports from the internet and going “hey, let’s just hit the thing right there and kabooom.” Or, reading the design and finding the weakness themselves. Just like Star Wars – they don’t want to lose the plans of the Death Star, or even worse, the safety report on the Death Star.

4. They have things of great value. Computers and rocket fuel and financial accounts – and they don’t want that stuff stolen.
5. They have employees who get performance reviews, who have salaries and home phone numbers and bank accounts for depositing pay checks and expenses and other private information. All of which must be protected.

There is a name for an organization with no classification system. Victim.