Science vs. National Security

capt.Hij writes "The NY Times has an article about how scientific journals are struggling with how to avoid publishing information that might help bio-terrorists. Once people start deciding that knowledge should be held by only a few then we are sanctioning ignorance. This is scary when it comes to democracy and decision making."

Comments

Re:Open Source

[Otter]

If the information is free and available, then anyone can read it and think about it and make a contribution. If it is not, the weekneses are known to a small subset of society who has less motivation to do something to solve the problem....I think the answer is that we NEED to have this informaition published. Anything else endangers us, and inhibits the progress of knowledge.

Virtually all scientific research (including industry research, eventually) is published? Do you see everyone reading the latest Journal of Cell Biology and contibuting? Is the ability to contribute going to be diminished if 0.0001% of research is deemed too sensitive to publish?

Contribution to open source software is far less than the hype suggests. How much good is giving you the latest 3D structure data of the Marburg virus receptor going to do society? I have misgivings about this censorship policy, but realistically the people who can usefully contribute will be able to get the information. Given how many people don't know the earth goes around the sun, I can't share the submitter's concern that democracy hangs on the public's access to the latest Ebola research.

Ridiculous

[dh003i]

This is the dumbest thing I've heard.

Do you really think that the avg. Palistinian terrorists -- who probably has a below average IQ -- is browing through the latest issue of Virulogoy to find lethal information?

Come on. That's nuts.

We should not allow scientists to with-hold data. The whole point of publishing is that the work be reproducible, verifiable.

I'm sorry, but if you publish something that is missing key details necessary for reproducibility -- due to national security or not -- that is crap. Its worthless. No one knows how you did it or how to get a similar result, so it can't be verified. Might as well not be published at all.

I have another suggestion for these journals. If some prissy scientist wants to "with-hold key information due to national security" then don't put them in your journal. Its a waste of space which could be devoted to reproducible work.

And remember the definition of security. Security means that even if you know exactly how something works, you can't penetrate it. If you know how it works and you can penetrate it, that means there is a weakness. For example, Zimmerman knows exactly how PGP works; but he cannot break it.