NASA to Release "SECRET" Survey

Recently, Larry Dighera posted:

Would it have been possible for Congress to have caused this data to
be made public if NASA had been privatized and the study conducted by
the private corporation contracted to fulfill NASA's role?

It seems that the opinions expressed here support the idea that the report
should be released in its entirety. However, I heard a comment from a NASA
spokesman on the yesterday's evening news that adds a dimension that I
haven't seen discussed, and I wonder if the folks here would feel
differently in light of this new information.

The spokesman said that the information was gathered with the
understanding that the anonymity of the participants would be protected,
and that as it stands, the comments could be traced back to the sources
(could that be why NASA wanted the data destroyed?).

So... if you were a participant in the survey who had an unreported
incident of significance, how would you feel about this data being
"outed"?

Neil

On Thu, 1 Nov 2007 15:14:32 -0600, "Neil Gould"
wrote in
:


The spokesman said that the information was gathered with the
understanding that the anonymity of the participants would be protected,
and that as it stands, the comments could be traced back to the sources
(could that be why NASA wanted the data destroyed?).

So... if you were a participant in the survey who had an unreported
incident of significance, how would you feel about this data being
"outed"?

It doesn't appear that that is going to occur:

Griffin said that under
federal law, "NASA is required to protect confidential commercial
information that is voluntarily provided to the agency and would
not customarily be released to the public." But, he said, all of
the data from the safety survey that does not contain confidential
commercial information, or information that could compromise the
anonymity of individual pilots, will be released as soon as
possible.
http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archive...ll.html#196491

Neil Gould wrote:
Recently, Larry Dighera posted:

Would it have been possible for Congress to have caused this data to
be made public if NASA had been privatized and the study conducted by
the private corporation contracted to fulfill NASA's role?

It seems that the opinions expressed here support the idea that the
report should be released in its entirety. However, I heard a comment
from a NASA spokesman on the yesterday's evening news that adds a
dimension that I haven't seen discussed, and I wonder if the folks
here would feel differently in light of this new information.

The spokesman said that the information was gathered with the
understanding that the anonymity of the participants would be
protected, and that as it stands, the comments could be traced back
to the sources (could that be why NASA wanted the data destroyed?).

So... if you were a participant in the survey who had an unreported
incident of significance, how would you feel about this data being
"outed"?

Neil

Simple, I would never give the information when they asked in the future and
I would probabably sue if I were damaged.

The story about this on NPR said that NASA was going to go over the data to
make sure that nothing would be released that could be traced back.

Even if they do that well and no one is outed this whole thing will have a
negative effect on future, similar studies. So the net result of this will
probably be less safety and the general population won't have learned a
single thing of any use to them.