The Canisius College Archives & Special Collections is pleased to announce the Spring Archives Speaker Series: "The Past That Has Yet to Pass: Archives and The Belfast Project," Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 2:30 pm.
Christine Anne George, JD, MSIS, will present on The Belfast Project, an oral history project conducted at Boston College that captures the dark period of Northern Irish history known as "The Troubles." George will discuss this controversial project, in the news since May 2011, when U.S. attorneys subpoenaed Boston College for oral history interview tapes and began an ensuing legal battle that reaches to the Supreme Court.
The Belfast Project was back in the spotlight this past month, on both sides of the Atlantic, with the death of Delours Price, whose oral history interview sparked debate on possession of the interviews, ramifications for the Northern Irish Peace Process, the future of archival privilege and other standards of archival practice.
Christine George received her BA from Bard College, her JD from St. John's University School of Law, and her MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. She currently works at the Charles B. Sears Law Library at SUNY Buffalo Law School where she serves as a faculty services and reference librarian and oversees the law library's archives. She began researching legal and ethical issues surrounding The Belfast Project for her thesis, "Whatever You Say, You Say Nothing: Archives and The Belfast Project." George has presented on the topic at archives symposia and conferences. An article on The Belfast Project is forthcoming summer 2013 in The American Archivist.
The Society of American Archivists has been closely following The Belfast Case, and developing informational pieces and tools for archivists to help them consider the impact on their work and profession.
The Canisius College Archives Speaker Series showcases scholars with a special understanding of archival research, based on their own experiences; and, who have completed an expression of scholarship reliant on archival research.
The recent blog post, "Should a legal right to 'archival privilege' be established?" posted on the blog Off the Record poses an interesting question which centers around the Boston College case involving the Belfast [Oral History] Project.
In brief, Boston College was subpoenaed on May 11, 2011 by Federal District Court for access to closed confidential oral histories that could contain information that might shed light on a murder inquiry in Northern Ireland.
While Boston College appeals the request maintaining the "confidentiality" of the oral histories and the case is "pending" in the Supreme Court, the questions among archivists linger — will confidential remain confidential and should there be an established legal right to "archival privilege"?
Many archivists have varying perspectives on this issue. Archivists have a professional duty to curate many types of materials, some of which contain confidential information. More thought provoking is the potential outcome of this case and how it will effect what people will be willing to archive in the future, inevitably impacting what will be remembered for generations to come.
Why didn't MIT defend Aaron Swartz?
University administrators, eager to kowtow to their federal paymasters, become surrogate enforcers rather than principled defenders of academic freedom.
When Aaron Swartz took his own life with the approach of trumped up legal proceedings of evidence poised to threaten his freedom, he became a national symbol of two notorious failings of our legal system: federal prosecutors who, with an eye on their conviction scorecard, overcharge cases and bully defendants into submission; and the enforcement of proprietary computer terms-of-service agreements as if they were the republic's first line of defense against mass sedition.
But the Swartz case brought home a third failing: the abject capitulation of MIT to the dictates of the U.S. attorney's office. In 2011, Swartz used MIT's computer system to access the proprietary academic-research site JSTOR, and thereby briefly liberated more than 4 million journal articles from behind the site's paywall. MIT administrators meekly permitted federal prosecutors access to Swartz and his computer, without benefit of a search warrant. And after JSTOR declined to press charges in Swartz's low-stakes hacking case, MIT chose to remain a complainant in the take-no-prisoners prosecution mounted by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who multiplied the counts against Swartz until he was looking at as many as 50 years in federal prison.
MIT's role is puzzling given its long history as one of the nation's chief progenitors of hacker culture. It allowed Richard Stallman, the programmer who essentially founded the free software movement, to use an office on campus as his operating base (and at times, reportedly, as his home). As the Swartz case demonstrates, universities that were once deemed preserves of cultural dissent and nonconformity, these days reflexively knuckle under to the powerful enforcing—and funding arms of the federal government.
To see how deep-seated this trend is, one need only look across town, to Boston College, where from 2001 to 2006 Irish historian Ed Moloney directed an oral history project, collecting interviews with former members of the Irish Republican Army about the group's past terrorism campaigns. Guarantees of confidentiality were central to the project, for obvious reasons. But in 2011, Northern Ireland prosecutors issued subpoenas for Moloney's interviews—subpoenas that the Department of Justice summarily dropped on BC.
BC did hire lawyers to fight the subpoenas (after Moloney leaked the story to the New York Times), but rather than defend academic freedom, the college pursued a narrower stay on the release of some of the interviews. This left Moloney and his collaborators to file their own broader appeal to the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments later this year.
Says Moloney: "When we sought amici briefs for our SCOTUS case we had no difficulties attracting journalistic and media organizations … but U.S. academe ran screaming for the shadows." And in late January, the BC case took its own eerie Swartz-like turn: Dolours Price, the former IRA member in Moloney's project whose participation originally roused the interest of Irish authorities, had died of an apparent drug overdose.
Laid side by side, these two Boston-area cases point to eerily similar trends: Inquisitorial federal prosecutors, operating under loose interpretations of the mandate to combat terrorism, are prepared to run roughshod over protocols that protect the traditions of academic autonomy and free inquiry—while university administrators, eager to kowtow to their federal paymasters, become surrogate enforcers rather than principled defenders of academic freedom.
Aaron Swartz's legacy might well produce important gains in the struggle to expand the free play of information into a significantly enlarged public sphere. But in institutional terms, the cases of MIT and Boston College suggest the struggle has already been fought—and lost.
Chris Lehmann, a contributing editor of In These Times, is an editor of Book Forum and the Baffler and the author of Rich People Things (Haymarket, 2011). He is now working on a book about American religion and the money culture.
The leaders of three main Irish American organizations have renewed their offensive against the U.S. Justice Department subpoenas aimed at the Boston College Troubles archive.
The two year battle has involved a challenge by the Belfast Project researchers Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre against what they and the organizations say is the misuse of the U.S-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty.
Said the groups in a statement: The confirmation of Senator John Kerry as Secretary of State and the elevation of Senator Robert Menendez to chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, two who have opposed the subpoenas, has given new strength to the cause.
The subpoenas have been issued by the Justice Department in response to requests originally filed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland.