Finally, Some Sense in Our Attempt at Homeland Security.

[kenel]

MSNBC is carrying a report on how The National Academy of Sciences is evaluating the advantages of witholding information when studies are published, in an attempt to keep the information from terrorists.

 

In my opinion, it is common sense with the war on terrorism to censor any information that could be used by our "enemy". Homeland Security advisors should have considered this quite a while ago.

 

And as the headline questions, Should scientists hold back research?

[Radical Edward]

marvellous. That will slow slow scientific progress to a crawl, and make it look to the public even more like scientists are just part of one massive military machine.

 

not to mention, but the recipie for C4 is already out there, people can buy aircraft lessons and fertiliser and whatnot. and I'm sure alot of these people buy US weapons anyway.

[Radical Edward]

furthermore, if a particular group of journals started to publish papers with insufficient detail, no-one would read them anymore. I wouldn't - It would make a mockery of the whole idea of peer review, and demote these jornals to little more than pop science.

[kenel]

I don't see how it would slow research down, just the time period that we recieve the results of research. They didn't say they were going to stop research all together.

[Radical Edward]

there is more than one group working on a topic you know. plus my main gripe is with the peer review system anyway. it would wreck that. no-one would buy any journal that published crap science like that.

[Hogslayer]

Think about this for a moment.

 

No real scientific publication with merit would be affected.

 

Websites like our own, however, could be intimidated with prosecution.

 

The "nuclear bomb plans" found in an AlQaida cave were part of a sarcastic piece of humor, not real science. Yet this made headlines, no one bothered to check into the details.

 

I'm with radE, this is utterly pointless. It is like saying that hunters shou;d not exchange load data because terrorist snipers might be more accurate if they tried it.