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Science Editors Urge Nondisclosure Of Bioterror Info
Jeraph Mason writes "According to this story on ABC news, science editors want to censor their publications because terrorists may use them. It's the same argument used to prevent security disclosures from being published." There's also coverage on the BBC and at The Washington Post.
How many average Joe's knew what a nuclear dirty bomb was 2 years ago? How many terrorists knew? The terrorists have had access to far more dangerous information (i.e. CIA handbooks from the 1980s), and have decided to get educated enough to be able to come up with their own scientifically-sound methods of mass destruction. There are terrorists out there that I'm sure could *write* for these science journals. All this policy does is create ignorant bliss among the masses as to the possible terrorist risks that exist.
It's the same argument used to prevent security disclosures from being published.
It's a little different, though. It's much harder to issue a security patch for the human body.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
There was an analysis written regarding the phrase "Life, Liberty and Persuit of Happiness" and it essential boiled down to this. Those words were chosen very specificaly and placed in the order that they were specificaly. That the order is indicative to the order which they must be considered:
Right to Life: This must be preserved at all costs, your life and the lives of those arround you are of upmost importance. All else pales in comparison, for without Life, all other rights are useless.
Right to Liberty: Your life havign been secured, your next thought should be liberty. All the freedoms greanted by the constitution etc. For it is impossible to persue the last god given right without Liberty.
Right to the Persuit of Happiness: Now you are truely free to try to make yourself happy, but only in so far as you do not infringe on the first 2 rights. In otherwords, if somethign done to ensure life and liberty does not make you happy, that's too bad.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It should really be up to the scientists whether or not to censor their findings. They truely understand the implications of their findings more than anyone else, and if someone else (editors) do it, we could be faced with a sort of USSR situation stagmenting scientific research. I don't want to die, but I don't want to live in a world without freedom.
Yet another signature that refers to itself. The irony and humor is dead.
According to the article, it's the editors of the science journals that wat to censor their content. Not the government or some other organization wanting to censor it for them.
This isn't as big an issue as it sounds. People censor themselves all the time: it's called being polite ("Don't have anything nice to say? Then don't say anything at all." Yeah, right).
It's not MS saying they want to censor 2600 from ppublishing content that might expose vulnrabilities in their software.
It's not the government saying they want to censor Slashdot because most people here think Bush is a confused muppet.
Let them censor themselves. They might just do it so much that they don't have any readers left.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
Rand McNalley should censor their maps of cities, omitting key terrorist targets.
This is retarded. The real danger, as I see it, is in keeping science secret, and not just due to concerns for public health (a very valid point). Allowing government policy to steer the direction of popular science is one of the greatest threats to our freedom.
Similar "arguments" to this one are made over encryption systems, because they might be used by criminals and terrorists to hide what they're doing. The "logic" bleeds into countless other debates as well, and the end conclusion always involves the government getting more control over what you can say and how you can say it.
Now, they look to seriously hinder all biological research. Who's going to spend years and grant money working on projects when they won't even get published? And for how long will this censorship go on? A couple years? That's probably enough to seriously diminish the number of fresh students entering the field. Let it go on longer, and in another 10 years we might not have any doctors.
Science is interdependent. You can't cut off your star running back's leg and expect him to keep scoring touchdowns for you. It just doesn't work.
Is hard to tell when something could be used for good or bad. Not publishing something maybe avoid that it could be used for bad, but also that it could be used for good.
With this kind of criteria, we would never know about atomic energy, space exploration, worldwide communications, modern medicine and almost everything that makes our current way of life.
Worst than this, if you don't publish, i.e. about a kind of disease, poison, etc, not ensures that "the bad guys" (whatever they are) will not discover it, and will put obstacles to the good guys that want to find a cure/solution/etc.
Speaking of canned air, you ever see those cans of presurized air for cleaning keyboards and stuff, theres the typical warning on the back, "deliberate concentration and inhalation of contents may cause illness or even death", its air for christsake!
If it was simply air, there would not be a probem with this. The issue occurs when they wat the air to some out of the can. They can't just pressurize regular air, as it would depressurize to fast.
So they add isopropyl. It's a form of rubbing alcohol. That's the stuff that'll kill you, if you inhale enough.
Also, if you are stupid enough to spray the stuff into your mouth through the little straw, it might expand your lungs, causing tearing of tissue, internal bleeding in lungs, collapsed lungs, or an adema-like condition where your blood causes you to drown. Remember, people are that stpid.
On a related note, it also shouldn't always be used in closed areas. Some computers have way too much dust inside the towers. That stuff isn't too good for you either.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
The official AAAS release, including a list of signatories, is here.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
This was the subject of this week's CBC radio program (available in .ogg) Quirks and Quarks : Bisecting Bioterrorism (ogg).
Is concerning to see the multitude of anti-Freedom directives produced in these last few years ...
mx
Absolutely incorrect.
Every source I have read (CNN, major newspapers) or seen (CNN again, CBC Newsworld, Discovery/TLC and PBS) has stated that the total collapse of the towers was not expected by anyone, not the designers or even Osama Bin Laden - he thought there would be mass casualties but never thought the buildings would fall (remember that little "smoking gun" video of him at the dinner party that was broadcast non-stop about a year ago?).
There is no evidence that any of the 9/11 attackers ever studied the plans of the towers. They followed the logic that if the towers were built to withstand the impact of a 727 (as was "common knowledge" as a strength and not a known weakness), then a 767 loaded with fuel should probably cause lots of damage.
Simple as that.
9/11 actually revealled a previously unknown weakness in the design. Without public access to the plans etc, experts and documentarians may not have found out why the towers fell, and engineers may be planning buildings with the same techniques today.
So much for security through obscurity...
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
After the fact, bin Laden in a video claimed to have made precise strucural calculations. He also spoke about prophetic dreams regarding the event and soccer...(hint: nutso)
What actually happened, was 15 men with knives attacked the country. They ridiculously overtrained for the job by attending flight schools (nearly getting themselves caught). The hard part of flying commercial aircraft happens to be take-off and landing. They didn't need that training, and therefore didn't need flight school. When it came time to hit the WTC, they merely pointed the airplanes at the building and did their best to hit dead on. Not a high level of sophistication there. One of the planes even missed its target (the capital building) and hit the pentagon instead. Another plane crashed because they neglected to properly secure the cockpit after capturing it.
Underestimating the terrorists on 9/11? The real problem was overestimating them afterwards. We still have not come to terms with the massive damage a poorly equiped, poorly educated, poorly organized, enemy can do to our country. If we had, reforming the INS would be job number one, not reorganizing CIA and FBI flowcharts for the department of Homeland Security.
What is the basis for that assertion?
CNN has for the past week been full of stories concerning a request by Turkey for munitions etc. to be moved into Turkey in case of attack by Iraq. Only the thing is that if you listen to the BBC you would have heard the Turkish minister responsible stating that Turkey was not behind the request, it was the US that made the request.
Another example of this is the constant claim that the UK supports the position of the Bush Administration on Iraq. According to the BBC a million people marched in the UK to tell the world that they do not support the Bush administration. Getting a million people to mobilize in a country of 55 million is a non trivial event, particularly when the party in power is left wing, the people marching ar Blairs base.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
No, I'm not talking about the difference between a sendmail root exploit and actually killing someone (though that's important too). In net security, the leading edge of exploit/virus/worm research isn't CERT or Symantec or ISS; it's teenage males without dates in Prague and Ann Arbor and Hong Kong. Thus, security through obscurity doesn't work because it can't encompass enough of the right people in the know.
Research in the hard sciences is different. The UCSF biologists and MIT chemists, the ones who would author the articles in question, are the leading edge. It's not like Saddam's labs are two years ahead of the rest of the world. Being more careful when publishing their research has a real chance of keeping valuable secrets out of the wrong hands.