At 06:58 PM 2/16/03 -0500, Pete Capelli wrote:
There's been a bit of discussion of this stuff in the US media, especially NPR. I think the idea is that the US government (and presumably others) want scientific publications to self-censor things that might be useful to terrorists, rogue states, and various other bad guys. Intuitively, this seems like a breathtakingly bad idea. (How does the information get out to working scientists, then? Do you create a situation where only people going to the best schools in the US and Europe get to learn the current state of the art in a bunch of fields of science? What do you do about preprints and such on the web?) But post-9/11, if three bureaucrats tell congress it's necessary to sacrifice a virgin a week in order to prevent the next terrorist attack, they'll vote unanimously to start drafting virgins and sharpening knives. *Nobody* wants to be blamed for "ignoring the warnings" of the next big terrorist attack.http://abc.net.au/news/scitech/2003/02/item20030216103135_1.htm"Self-governance," the editors say, is "an alternative to government review of forthcoming journal articles." I don't edit any science journals, but I would expect there is no law requiring 'government review'. So what are the editors talking about?
The creepier subtext here is the whole idea that there are some technologies that only the Elect (in the currently powerful nations) ought to be permitted, and that any attempt to investigate Banned Technologies just might get you arrested or invaded or bombed. This general idea seems to pop up a lot, e.g., in Bill Joy's essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," in Vinge's wonderful novel _The Peace War_, in Larry Niven's Known Space stories. It's hard to imagine a better recipe for massively slowing the advance of technology, protecting incumbents in every field and industry, and generally making mankind worse off in order to protect him. And yet, it's an apparently natural reaction to being frightened by the threats of new technologies. (Ironically, the nasty terror weapons we're all worried about are mostly 1940s or earlier technology. Stuff that even a third-rate starving dictatorship can cook up.)
-pete
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
