ABSTRACT
One month after the September 11, 2001 Attacks , government depository libraries across the United States received a request from the U.S. Geological Survey, through the Library Programs Service of the U.S. Government Printing Office, to destroy copies of a compact disk titled Source-Area Characteristics of Large Public Surface-Water Supplies in the Coterminous United States: An Information Resource for Source-Water Assessment, 1999. Similar instructions to hold back or destroy wide-ranging materials previously accessible to the general public were issued within and among local, state, and federal government agencies and presumably are continuing today. The requests and directive are being made with the reasoning that certain information in openly-published or accessible documents might provide knowledge of value to terrorists. Questions arise as to whether some of the withholdings, even if legal, rationally support the goal of increasing the security of communities and the nation. This raises the question of whether a general climate of restricting public access to geographic and related data actually may jeopardize rather than increase homeland security.
