Interesting People mailing list archives
Airport fun (and 'security' in general)
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2003 08:04:35 -1000
------ Forwarded Message From: George Dyson <gdyson () ias edu> Date: Sun, 05 Jan 2003 11:33:41 -0500 To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: Re: [IP] Airport fun (and 'security' in general) On Saturday, January 4, 2003, at 10:01 PM, Dave Farber wrote:
May I send to IP
Yes (and now I see you already did). Hope I made it clear that (in this case) the guards were kind and professional--it's just that the whole notion of what we can and cannot do to ensure "security" is skewed. (I'm with Marvin Minsky, who has called for a "Department of Homeland Arithmetic" to fairly assess costs vs risks...) Today I'm feeling the heavy hand of "security" somewhere else. As you know I'm here in Princeton for the year going through the internal archives at the IAS. For an upcoming talk on the von Neumann legacy I want to include a bit about the origins of the Monte Carlo method, but I left my copy of the original Los Alamos report, "Statistical Methods in Neutron Diffusion" (LAMS-551, April 1947) at home, knowing I could always download the PDF from the Los Alamos Library site... well, guess what, access is now restricted to *all* the old Los Alamos reports formerly available as PDFs via the "Library without walls" project at LANL. LAMS-551 is an openly published, unclassified report. So are other classic Los Alamos reports like Stanislaw Ulam's "Some elementary attempts at numerical modeling of problems concerning rates of evolutionary processes" (1970) and "On the possibility of extracting energy from gravitational systems by navigating space vehicles" (1958). What on earth is gained by restricting access to such unclassified research?? All these reports were carefully selected for the Library Without Walls project because they are important historical documents--and show that even during the height of the Cold War our best weaponeers found time for fundamental scientific work. OK, I'm a liberal and a pacifist. So, for balance, here's what Edward Teller had to say (in Technology Review): ³Science thrives on openness, but during World War II we were obliged to put secrecy practices into effect. After the war, the question of secrecy was reconsidered, but the practice of classification continued; it was our security,¹ whether it worked or failed. We now have millions of classified technical documents. The limitations we impose on ourselves by restricting information are far greater than any advantage others could gain by copying our ideas.² Unnecessary secrecy hurts "us" more than it hurts "them". ----------------------------------------------------------------- George Dyson gdyson () ias edu Institute for Advanced Study (Director's Visitor, 2002-2003) Mailing address: 252 von Neumann Drive, Princeton, NJ, 08540 telephone: 609-279-2904 mobile: 360-223-2858 __________________________________________________________________ ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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