Today I went to a Caltech Social Activism event called “At JPL: the fight against Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12”.

As one of the counter-measures for terrorism threats after 9/11, the directive dictates that every employee or contractor at any federal agency should wear some kind of special badge. This applies also to JPL, which is “operated” by Caltech: the government funds NASA, NASA gives money to Caltech, and JPL people are Caltech employees or contractors. To obtain the badge, the employees had to “voluntarily” sign a waiver for an extensive background check.

Some JPL employees protested because this applied also to the 97% working on nonsensitive projects. They refused to sign the waiver, and started an ongoing legal battle; the whole story with all the documentation is at the website http://hspd12jpl.org/.

I knew the story, but I didn’t know some of the background. The Caltech administration has not been sympathetic to these protests, and this might be understandable in the current situation in which there is political pressure for some laboratories to be privatized. Robert Nelson told the audience that it’s no secret that Lockheed-Martin wants to take over the operations of JPL.

A similar case is that of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the two laboratories that develop nuclear programs, the other being the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It has been managed by the University of California until 2003. Then political reasons led to a public bidding for the contract. Lockheed-Martin bid together with the University of Texas. The University of California bid together with Bechtel through a newly formed company called Lawrence Livermore National Security, which ultimately won. Now the laboratory has lost the academic atmosphere and is being managed more like a private company; naturally people are worried about the lack of transparency.