Purdue erases Pulitzer Prize winner's keynote

Purdue University erased a keynote speech in an "overreaction" to regulations by the U.S. Department of Defense, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barton Gellman said Wednesday.

Gellman presented a keynote last month "about the NSA, Edward Snowden, and national security journalism in the age of surveillance" at Dawn or Doom 2, a conference examining the impact of emerging technology on our daily lives.

In a story on tcf.org, the website for Washington,D.C.-based think tank The Century Foundation, Gellman said that during his presentation he "displayed classified documents briefly on screen," prompting Purdue to delete the video recording of the lecture rather than publish it. Gellman said the presentation of classified information covered five of the 90 minutes he spent on stage.

Purdue holds a "Facility Security Clearance" from the U.S. government to conduct national security research using classified documents, according to Board of Trustees documents from 2014. Rather than create an entity separate from the university to operate under such a contract, as other peers have done, Gellman said Purdue's contract and the government's ability to censor material extend across the entire campus.

"You start off with a promise that if the government let's you in on its classified secrets, you'll keep them for the purpose of a research contract," Gellman said in a phone interview with the Journal & Courier Thursday. "And if that really does spill over into the academic work on the campus as a whole, then you've invited the federal government to censor the work that the university is doing, either at a conference or elsewhere."

During a question-and-answer portion of the lecture, an attendee asked if some of the documents presented were classified, said Julie Rosa, assistant vice president of strategic communications. The attendee reported the breach to Purdue's Research Information Assurance Officer — a position required under the government contract, Gellman said — who consulted the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Department of Defense.

The agency "confirmed that Purdue is required to comply with federal regulations that prohibit further dissemination of classified information," Rosa said in an email Thursday. "To ensure compliance in following the law, the entire speech was removed."

But in an email to Gellman Wednesday, Rosa said destroying the video rather than blocking the segment in question was "an overreaction while attempting to comply with the regulations" and the university was working to recover the video.

Rosa confirmed Thursday that Purdue's information technology department is attempting to recover the video.

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked documents to Gellman and other journalists revealing an array of government surveillance programs, said Wednesday on Twitter that Purdue's move was a "sad day for academic freedom."

Steve Schultz, Purdue's legal counsel, said the campus still is committed to free speech and the decision was a judgement call on behalf of the assurance officer, who is listed on Purdue's website as Mary Duarte Millsaps. Millsaps did not return a message for comment Thursday.

"We don't view this episode as any sort of compromise of Purdue's commitment to free and open inquiry," he said in an email Thursday. "It was the university's desire to raise awareness of Mr. Gellman's area of expertise that brought him to campus in the first place."

It's ironic, however, that a keynote lecture about surveillance and censorship was destroyed to follow government guidelines, Gellman said.

"I think it is sad that Purdue reached out and invited me to come and talk about Snowden and the NSA," he said, "and some elements of the university decided it was shocking that I would post documents that have been long since been made public in the coverage of the NSA debate."

Although the documents in question were classified information, Gellman said, they are freely and easily accessible on the Internet and therefore should not be ignored. Gellman provided the seven slides in question to the Journal & Courier, which identified, among other mass data collection programs, the NSA's Upstream and PRISM programs that collect communications using fiber cables and infrastructure or directly from the servers of major internet companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft.

"Pretending it doesn’t exist when it's specifically relevant to the thing you’ve decided to talk about in an academic context is worse than irrational," he said. "It's basically at odds with the university mission."