Should the location of hazardous waste facilities be on the web? How about dams? Reservoirs for public drinking water? How about photos of these facilities? Or floorplans?
Should the public know what controls are in place to make sure the local nuclear power plant doesn’t melt down?
Should research on antibiotic-resistant anthrax be easily available?
Can you trust that terrorists won’t be able to find that data and make use of it?
Can you trust that the government won’t use the excuse hiding of such data to avoid needed oversight? Will private industries who want to avoid environmentalist scrutiny be able to use such security concerns as cover?
Is the excuse of keeping secrets away from terrorists taking the place of the excuse of keeping secrets away from the Reds?
Is total disclosure of information better or worse than total lockdown of data? How can a democracy function without an informed public? How can a democracy function without a secure public?
Who decides where to draw the line? Who watches the watchmen?
“In an open society such as ours, you always run the risk that someone is going to use information in a bad way,” Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, said. “You have to take every step to minimize those risks without undermining our democratic principles. You can’t just shut down the flow of information.”
“Do you pull all the Rand McNally atlases from the libraries? I mean, how far do you go?” asked Julia Wallace, head of the government publications library at the University of Minnesota.
“We . . . decided not to remove [on-line anthrax research],” said Dr. Ronald Atlas, president-elect of the [American Society for Microbiology] . “The principle right now is one of openness in science. . . . If someone wants to publish [a legitimate research paper], we’re not going to be the censor.”
“We have to get away from the ethos that knowledge is good, knowledge should be publicly available, that information will liberate us,” said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. “Information will kill us in the techno-terrorist age, and I think it’s nuts to put that stuff on Web sites.”
Do I have any simple, easy answers for this?
Hell, no.
(Via Capt. Rooba)