WASHINGTON -- Claiming terrorists could "obtain all this potentially dangerous information," the chairman of the House Commerce committee said Tuesday he wants to make it unlawful to publish reports about chemical-plant safety on the Internet.
"I don't think that we can go too far to prevent terrorism," said Tom Bliley, a Virginia Republican.
He said Congress should "put penalties on for the improper dissemination" of information related to the possibility of serious chemical accidents. "You'd have to keep it off the Internet," Bliley said at a press conference on Capitol Hill.
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The FBI and the CIA say terrorists will use information about possible chemical accidents to target American cities.
"What Congress is doing is trying to respond to the demands of the chemical industry to keep important safety information out of the hands of the public," said Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It pretty clearly is not constitutional."
Bliley sees things differently. "The First Amendment right doesn't give you the right of free speech to yell fire in a crowded theater," he said.
By June 1999, over 60,000 chemical plants will have submitted their worst-case-scenario accident information to the Environmental Protection Agency. Under the EPA regulation, companies are supposed to describe what might happen if their largest tank with regulated chemicals fails -- and how dangerous the accident would be to nearby communities.
The database will be available to local and state officials, who will use it to brief community groups about the safety of nearby manufacturing and chemical facilities.
Bliley's worry? Some people could post the information online, where terrorists may be poised with fingers on mouse buttons. It echoes a recurring theme of the press conference: the dangers of the Internet.
"I think about my family," said Representative Fred Upton (R-Michigan), who said he's "concerned about access to pornography." Bliley, too, is a longtime champion of the Child Online Protection Act -- which a federal judge ruled violated the First Amendment.
The duo then tried an emotional plea. They asked Diane Leonard, whose husband, a Secret Service agent, was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, to speak.
"If any of those supporting the dissemination of this information on the Internet could step inside any of us who have lost loved ones to terrorism, they would change their positions on this issue," said Leonard as she peeked over the six microphones at the podium. She said she saw her "husband's mutilated body," and Internet publication would result in more corpses.
