Information "wants" to be free

The Volokh Conspiracy points to an editorial by Laura Donohue in The Washington Post called "Censoring science won't make us any safer."

Terrorists will obtain knowledge. Our best option is to blunt their efforts to exploit it.

I tend to agree.  The internet has had an unprecidented effect on the availability of both information and mis-information, and while one can easily argue the merits of keeping certain information secret, I don't think the advantages of such an approach outweigh the disadvantages.  Besides,

For better or worse, the cat is out of the bag -- something brought home to me last weekend when I visited the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. One hands-on exhibit allowed children to transfer genetic material from one species to another. I watched a 4-year-old girl...

...take a red test tube whose contents included a gene that makes certain jellyfish glow green. Using a pipette, she transferred the material to a blue test tube containing bacteria. She cooled the solution, then heated it, allowing the gene to enter the bacteria. Following instructions on a touch-screen computer, she transferred the contents to a petri dish, wrote her name on the bottom, and placed the dish in an incubator. The next day, she could log on to a Web site to view her experiment, and see her bacteria glowing a genetically modified green.

In other words, the pre-kindergartener (with a great deal of help from the museum) had conducted an experiment that echoed the Australian mousepox study. Obviously, this is not something the child could do in her basement. But just as obviously, the state of public knowledge is long past anyone's ability to censor it.