Mr. KASTENMEIER. Thank you.

Next I would like to call on Dr. Karl Willenbrock. We have your 13-page statement and you may proceed from it, or summarize it, if you wish.

Professor WILLENBROCK. With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit my statement for the record and summarize my comments.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. Without objection.

Professor WILLENBROCK. First I would like to make a few comments about the scientific and engineering professional societies in general, and IEEE in particular, since the incidents I will be describing are those related to the Institute of Electronics Engineers. This Institute is a leading professional society for the electrical, electronics and computer engineers and scientists. It has a transnational membership of more than 230,000 members. It has roughly 190,000 members living in the United States. It publishes more than 50 technical periodicals and it sponsors more than 225 major technical meetings on a yearly basis. It is a very active and dynamic group.

It is typical of many of the professional societies that exist in other areas of technical specialization. There are more than a thousand such societies in the engineering and scientific areas throughout the country. It is a safe generalization to say that there are no major areas of science and technology that are not served by an active professional society.

The important point I would like to make, and it is reinforced by the statements made by the previous testifiers, that the meetings and periodicals really are an integral part of the communications system that was described in more general terms by Doctors Magrath and Press. The papers presented are presented for the information and stimulation of the technical community. The people that participate are from all parts of the spectrum. They range from Nobel Laureates to students. Such presentations are an effective and important part of the communication which keeps the community alive. People go to the meetings and read the periodicals to know what is going on in their fields. It is the way of maintaining and keeping up to date fast-moving technological areas.

If I may cite a personal experience, last summer I spent a few weeks in Indonesia as part of a U.S. group working with their Ministry of Research and Technology. The Indonesians are very interested in improving their rate of scientific and technical progress. I was amazed to find that there is very little professional society activity there. Scientists and engineers from different groups really did not know what was going on in their own country. It is not surprising that their rate of technological progress is quite slow. I feel, as do most members of the scientific and technical community that our open system is a very integral part of what makes us move ahead rapidly. It has been an essential element contributing to the leading worldwide position that the United States now has in science and technology.

Let me now discuss the openness of the system and answer a question that was raised by previous witnesses. How open is the system? What about proprietary information in the industrial community?

The communication or information dissemination system is as open as people want to make it. There are some pressures both ways. Look at it from an individual standpoint. An individual would like to present his research results and get the acknowledgement from the community of his peers. On the other hand, most researchers don't give away what they plan to work on next because they don't want to be scooped. People make individual judgments as to the content of their presentations. This is particularly true for the university community.

Now consider the industrial community. Engineers and scientists in the industrial community typically have their papers reviewed by their patent departments. They are concerned about giving away commercially important information. However, most companies have learned how to do it; they keep proprietary information out of their papers, but still their engineers and scientists are active participants in the communication process. Look at the IEEE as a typical organization. More than 60 percent of its authors are industrially employed. In some ways the company has some of the same motivations as the individual. Companies want to be considered first-class technical organizations that are up-to-date. They are active supporters of the professional societies. Their employees are members and participate actively in both the meetings and the operation of the periodicals. There are ways for individuals to operate effectively with some information which is not open and other information which is open. Industrially-employed engineers as well as the university-based engineers operate very effectively together. Some of the problem areas have been illustrated by the previous speakers. It should be understood that there really aren't procedural problems related to information which is clearly assigned a security classification by the appropriate government authority. Such information is not published in IEEE publications or presented at open IEEE meetings. It is IEEE policy to require all authors to certify that the papers they submit for publication or presentation at meetings have been cleared by the appropriate authorities within their organizations.

Difficulties arise when authors submit for publication or presentation information which is considered releasable or has been released within their companies, but then is later described as classified or otherwise unpublishable by a Federal agency representative.

Let me cite three instances in which the IEEE was directly involved.

The first incident involves an article which was submitted by an author for publication in the IEEE Spectrum last year. Spectrum is an award-winning monthly periodical which is circulated worldwide to all IEEE members. Accompanying me today is Mr. Rubenstein, the managing editor of Spectrum. He was directly involved in the incident. He can supply more detailed information if you so desire.

The article was entitled "Out-Numbered and Out-Weaponed by Soviets, the U.S. Army Shoots for High Technology," and after being submitted by an external author, it was subjected to the usual expert review process. Since the author quoted the then Secretary of the Army, the article was sent to his office for review. A

month-and-a-half later the Spectrum staff editors received a telephone call from the Army Office of the Chief of Public Affairs with the message that the manuscript contained classified information and should be shredded immediately.

Upon questioning, the Army representative identified three statements as being classified. The Spectrum staff investigated the origins of these three statements and found that two statements had been published in an unclassified, widely disseminated Army publication entitled, "1982 Weapons Systems," and the third was from public testimony of the Army Chief of Staff to the 97th Congress.

When this information was presented to the Army representative, it was agreed that the two published phrases were not really classified but that the Chief of Staff's testimony had been reclassified. The explanation was offered that unclassified information can sometimes be put together in such a way as to be reclassifiable. It turns out that this issue was not pursued further, since the article did not meet the technical standards appropriate for the Spectrum. The article was not published.

However, the incident does provide an opportunity to examine the effect that such Federal agency actions can have on the scientific and technical publishing community. Many authors of technical articles confronted with such a statement by a military representative would simply have withdrawn the article. However, in this case a full-time editor of Spectrum who is not readily turned aside followed up and found that the reasons for withdrawal were at best questionable. Many technical authors-and I would consider Dr. Davida as an exception-tend to avoid topics that might be disapproved by a Federal agency. They try to keep out of harm's way and try to avoid getting involved with such issues.

Mr. KASTENMEIER. Dr. Willenbrock, regrettably I am going to have to interrupt the remainder of your presentation so that we can make a vote on the House floor. That's what the buzzers were all about. Therefore, we will have to recess for 10 minutes. I regret dividing your very fascinating testimony, but if you don't mind, sir, and the other witnesses, we will have to recess for about 10 minutes. We will reconvene at about 12:15.

Accordingly, the committee is in recess.

[Whereupon, the subcommittee was in recess.]

Mr. KASTENMEIER. The committee will come to order. We will return to Dr. Willenbrock, who was in the middle of his presentation.

Professor WILLENBROCK. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Your timing was good enough to interrupt between incidents one and two.

The second incident happened last year in connection with an IEEE-sponsored International Test Conference in Philadelphia which was run by the IEEE Computer Society.

Five days before the conference was to open, and after the conference_publication had been printed, an official of Texas Instruments, Inc. requested by telephone that three papers written by TI engineers on very large scale integrated circuits be withdrawn. The Air Force Systems Command considered the release of these papers to be potentially damaging to U.S. interests. The authors, who are

IEEE members, believed their papers were cleared having followed the usual internal procedures at TI.

Apparently the government reviewers did not decide until very late-that is, until 5 days before the conference, after the Conference Digest had been printed and some copies supplied to reporters-that the papers should not be published. The conference managers were asked to excise the papers from the already printed Conference Digest and to ask reporters who had received prepublication copies to return them.

The conference managers decided to require before taking these steps that: One, a written explanation of the reasons for removing the papers be given; two, that the authors themselves request the removal, and three, that an agreement be made to pay the costs of destroying portions of the already printed record. In response to these requirements, a rereview of the papers by the Air Force resulted in a decision that the original papers could be presented as planned. They were.

A third incident occurred in 1982 in connection with the EASCON Conference held in Washington. It was sponsored by the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society. Just before the conference opened the conference chairman was asked by an Air Force representative to destroy all conference records and to cancel the presentation of certain papers. The conference chairman responded that he might agree to do so if the estimated cost of between $25,000 to $50,000 was borne by the Air Force. A day later, the Air Force representative withdrew his request. Later a Navy representative made a similar request which was also withdrawn after the costs were described.

In view of these incidents, it has become evident to the IEEE that it needed to have a practical procedure to handle such cases. Typically the chairman of an IEEE Technical Conference Program is an engineer employed by a company or university who undertakes this additional responsibility as a part-time voluntary professional society task. The IEEE is presently working on what we call a hot line procedure which would make available to any conference program manager or journal editor access to the IEEE general manager's office. In this office, previous experience with this type of situation is available and also legal counsel is available if necessary. We are also seeking to devleop appropriate points of contact within the DOD so that reasonable decisions can be reached in short periods of time.

The IEEE does not have a complete record of how many incidents of this type have occurred, since they are not all reported. However, there have been other incidents in which papers have been withdrawn at the request of military representatives.

I might interpolate that the general advice that is given to IEEE representatives in such cases is that, first, don't roll over, second, get good advice, and third, don't go to jail.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to measure the impact on the electrical/electronics and computer community of incidents such as these. Certainly they have the chilling effect which was described by previous testifiers. I should like to cite two examples of such ef fects, one relating to an IEEE committee, and the second relating

to the research choices of an IEEE member who is a very capable junior engineering faculty member.

A number of IEEE members who are part of the Solid-State Circuits and Technology Committee canvassed their members recently to determine what topics would generate the most interest as focal points for proposed workshops in the spring of 1982. Two topics were selected, one on high speed technologies and the other on the very high speed integrated circuits program, VHSIC, which the DOD has sponsored.

Before going ahead with planning for a workshop on VHSIC, the DOD program manager's office was contacted. The manager's representative indicated that VHSIC was controlled by the international traffic in arms regulations [ITAR]. Therefore, if the workshop included information on chip fabrication and processes, chip architecture, internal details of the chip, and the performance details of chips, all workshop attendees would be required to present proof of U.S. citizenship. Such proof would not be required if only topics such as brass boards and the names of chips were to be covered.

The IEEE group decided that there were too many constraints and the result was that this workshop was not held. Whether this decision was an advance or a loss for U.S. national security is hard to decide. However, it is possible to assert that the planners of this workshop, which included engineers from Bell Labs, IBM, and the University of California at Berkeley, et cetera, are among the most productive and capable engineers in the United States in this particular field.

The second incident I would like to relate is a personal experience with a fellow faculty member at SMU, who recently completed his Ph.D. at Princeton in communications theory. We were discussing some of the interesting areas where technical problems existed, and he indicated he carefully avoided those topics which were close to DOD interests because he feared his work could be classified. He considered this possibility disastrous because it would not enable him to publish his results or communicate with his professional colleagues. Thus, the effect of current classification procedures in this case may well be the opposite of what is intended. The Nation's security can be weakened rather than strengthened if bright engineers and scientists avoid working in defense-related fields or holding meetings on subjects which are close to defense interests.

In summary, I would like to make the following points:

One, an open communication system is an essential element in the operation of the U.S. engineering and science community.

Two, it is possible for industrially employed professionals to operate with both restricted and unrestricted information and still be active and effective participants in an essentially open communication system.

Three, that an open communication system is vulnerable to improper or careless application of classification procedures.

Four, those responsible for policymaking and policy implementation in classifying engineering and scientific information should be aware of the very substantial damage they can do to the U.S. technological enterprise.