U.S. Tighening Rules of Keeping Scientific Secrets

MobyTurbo writes: "In this article The New York Times (free registration, blah blah blah) reports that the Bush Administration is removing over 6,000 declassified documents from the public domain as part of the war on terrorism. Many scientists quoted in the article think that this will impead the development of science, especially the development of new vaccines."

Comments

This is a typical response...

[gartogg]

of an administration that has demonstrated a penchant for glitz over substance, and stupid vote-mongering over intelligrent decisions.

As long as Bush really beleives that he needs public support, he can not make decisions. The real problem I see is that Bush can't make unpopular decisions, ever. He will never do anything right as long as he tries to cater to everyone. In my book, the hallmark of a sucessful president is that he can make unpopular decisions and LEAD the populace, instead of following it. Bush has done nothing but invest in knee jerk responses to events: He labels the axis of evil so he can fufill the latent desire for revenge he has been unable to provide through the wholly half-assed, unsuccessful response to Osama Bin Laden.

Public domain

[sydb]

How can you remove stuff from the public domain? Does no-one have any copies? If not, it was probably useless information anyway.

Re:Public domain

[Tackhead]

> How can you remove stuff from the public domain? Does no-one have any copies? If not, it was probably useless information anyway.

That's OK, 99% of the classified information is also probably useless too ;)

The Doctor's Analysis

[Dr. Carl Jung]

According to the article, "The federal reports already withdrawn, once sold freely to the public, include not only declassified ones from the 1940's, 50's and 60's but also modern ones that were previously judged to contain nothing that had to be kept secret." The attempt to restrict both old declassified research and modern unclassified research will prove unsuccessful:

Old Research: Passing legislation in an attempt to restrict the flow of 60 year old information is pretty hopeless. If the information has already been exposed to the public for over half a century, one can assume that terrorists already have a hold of it.

New Research: We shouldn't be worried about terrorists utilizing modern research to develop a super-mega-death bomb. Cold-War era weapons are deadly enough for a terrorist. After all, about 2000 people died on Sept. 11, while 70,000 were decimated over half a century ago by the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.