"U.S. Finds Too Many KBR Reports 'Proprietary'"

Read the full article by Griff Witte, The Washington Post, October 28, 2006.

The article states:

A Halliburton Co. subsidiary is abusing federal regulations by marking nearly all information it gives to the government about its operations in Iraq "proprietary," a practice that promotes unnecessary secrecy and could hurt competition, according to a report released yesterday by U.S. auditors.

Under federal law, contractors are allowed to mark some documents proprietary, especially when they are bidding on a deal. But auditors for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc. was using that stamp even with such basic records as daily head counts of how many people ate at the company's dining facilities. KBR is the Pentagon's largest contractor in Iraq, providing logistics support for the Army including meals, fuel, laundry service and base construction.

There is a real problem in government funded work not being available to the public in the United States (and I suspect in most other countries). The idea of getting companies to share data with the government by guaranteeing that it will not be shown to competitors is good, but subject to abuse in practice/

So too is the classification of information that may reduce the security of the United States a good idea, but one that has been often abused in the past, and one that probably is being more abused now and will be abused in the future.

Research that is funded by the government should go in the public domain. In the past, when making such data available meant publishing on paper, there was a rationale for not publishing negative results or other results that did not pass peer review for journal publication. Today such data is in electronic form to begin with, and publication on the web is cheap.

There seem to have been cases of negative results not being published in the past because they would diminish the value of commercial products. While this seems to be more a problem of company funded research, when those results have a bearing in regulatory action such as of the Food and Drug Administration, this too is an abuse.

Knowledge does not help development if it is not used, and knowledge held secret to prevent its use is an abuse!