Should information be withheld from academic journals because of the potential that it might fall into the hands of terrorists? The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has asked the journals Science and Nature to keep certain details out of reports they intend to publish about experiments that produced a human-transmissible version of a flu virus that is deadly about 50 percent of the time.

The NSABB said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.” This government panel has not sought to ban the release this information, so we’re not talking about formal censorship, but the request is at an early point on the censorship continuum.

It would seem that withholding this information from academic journals might do some good. But the limiting factor on production of a newly transmissible virus is training in virology (or whatever) and access to the equipment that allows such work to be done—not access to data about the technique used in these experiments. Whether it’s published in these journals or not, a criminal/​terrorist virologist would probably be able to access the data using the subterfuge of having a genuine scientific interest.

So, to stop terrorists accessing bioweapons do we limit training in virology? Control laboratory equipment as dual-use civilian/​military technology? No, because the massive weight of training and equipment—something approaching, if not actually, 100 percent—will go to people who will use these things to make us safer, even if a one-off tries to use virology skills to make us unsafe.

It’s a close call, and I’m not entirely certain about what I’ve just said, but this is a more difficult logic puzzle than most people think. Given the overwhelming majority of good people using information for good, diffusion of information will almost always be good. I doubt that the NSABB has sufficiently considered the costs of withholding information about the modified virus from people who would use that information to secure against its modification by whatever invention they bring to bear. (I can’t cite the invention because it hasn’t been invented yet!)

This is akin to the gun control issue. Consensus goes against guns because they make a loud bang and often draw blood when they’re used harmfully, but they are utterly silent in their beneficial use of deterring crime and violence, which is what they do the vast majority of the time. The idea of a massive epidemic strikes our primal imaginations with fear, while the notion of scientists converting diffuse knowledge into security against epidimics is a somber intellectual exercise.

Speaking of imagination, the idea of the terrorist super-villain is widespread, but imaginary. It’s important to remember that the 9/11 terrorists had box cutters. They had no idea their attack would produce the collapse of the twin towers, though many people reasoned backwards from that devastation to give them sophistication (and motivations) they didn’t actually have. It’s our psychology/​imagination that gave terrorists access to chem/bio/rad/super-weapons over the last decade, a notion that almost certainly infects the considerations of the NSABB.

It’s probably a mistake to withhold scientific data from publication. We’re rather more safe from the threat of biological terrorism than most people think, and we’d get marginally safer from having information about virus experiments easily available to any researcher who might use it to discover ways of making us even safer.

(Related: Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies has a great contrarian piece in the Cato book Terrorizing Ourselves about the counterproductive mania around bioweapons, though his points don’t easily sync up with what I’ve said here.)

Newspaper articles on government budgets virtually never tell the reader the two most important facts: What was the budget last year, and what is it this year? Instead, the typical budget article trumpets “cuts” and “austerity,” and never actually mentions that the budget is going up by four percent, or six percent, or nine percent in the coming year. So two cheers to the Washington Post for its article on Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s proposed budget, which does—eventually—give you most of that information. Still, the second paragraph (and second sentence) of the article says that McDonnell “proposed saving nearly $1 billion in a variety of ways.”

You have to wait for the seventh paragraph, on the jump page, before you find out that the proposed budget amounts to $85 billion over two years. And only in the 20th of 25 paragraphs do you find out that

The two-year budget, which begins July 2012, will be the largest spending plan in Virginia history, growing by about $7 billion.

So two cheers for giving the facts, even if the lead of the story might have led some readers to think that McDonnell was cutting $1 billion from the state’s budget. And three cheers for Steve Contorno of the Washington Examiner, who put the basic facts clearly in the third paragraph (and third sentence) of his article:

In an hour-long address to the General Assembly’s budget committees, McDonnell laid out an $85 billion spending plan through June 30, 2014, up from $79 billion in 2010–2012.

Please, reporters: when you write about a city, state, or federal budget, please tell us readers and taxpayers how much the budget actually is, and how much it will be next year. With that information, we can figure out for ourselves whether it involves cuts or not.

Politico yesterday reported that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is upset. According to him, the USDA just don’t get no respect:

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wants to spread the message to anyone who’ll listen: The U.S. Department of Agriculture isn’t just about farming anymore.

“This department is not appreciated,” the former Iowa governor told POLITICO in a recent interview. “We are engaged in virtually every issue and always can provide some support and some meaningful solution to a problem that is vexing folks.”

To prove the point, he challenges anyone to name an issue that doesn’t touch the department’s portfolio, from bolstering national security by helping wean Afghan farmers from growing opium — a cash crop that funds Islamic insurgents fighting U.S. troops — to providing USDA-backed home loans as a way to repopulate the sparse countryside. [emphasis added, with disgust]

Not bad for an agency that shouldn’t even exist.

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Can Gingrich rein in “judicial activists”?

My response:

As I wrote in the Daily Caller a week ago, Newt Gingrich’s attack on the judiciary in chapter nine of his 21st Century Contract with America is a mass of constitutional confusions. It’s a direct assault on judicial review and on “judicial supremacy,” in particular — the idea that it falls to the courts to say what the law is. Newt would have us believe that that idea was invented by the Supreme Court in its 1958 decision in Cooper v. Aaron, where a unanimous Court told Arkansas officials resisting a school desegregation order that they couldn’t “nullify” a Court decision. But the power of courts to say what the law is far predates that decision. It’s implicit in our written Constitution with its independent judiciary. It was discussed explicitly and at length in the Federalist Papers. And it was secured by the Court in 1803 in Marbury v. Madison.

The Stop Online Piracy Act—a bill misleadingly named for its aspirations, not its probable effect—has provoked an outpouring of justified opposition, much of it centered on two primary concerns: The virtual certainty that it will result in the ancillary blocking of much legitimate free speech, and the damage it would do to the basic architecture of the open Internet. One point I haven’t seen pressed forcefully enough thus far, however, is that architectural and free speech concerns are not entirely independent. The practical effect of SOPA will be to create an architecture for censorship—both legal and technological—that will radically alter the costs of engaging in future censorship unrelated to piracy or counterfeiting.

SOPA is a 70 page statute establishing a detailed legal process by which the Justice Department can initiate blocking of supposed pirate domains by ISPs and search engines, and by which private parties can seek orders requiring payment processors and ad networks to sever ties. After flying largely below the radar of public attention for many months, we’re finally seeing sustained scrutiny and fierce debate over the bill. But the portion of the bill laying out the specific types of criminal conduct that trigger this Rube Goldberg censorship machine occupy just a couple of paragraphs. With the legal framework in place, expanding it to cover other conduct—obscenity, defamation, “unfair competition,” patent infringement, publication of classified information, advocacy in support of terror groups—would be a matter of adding a few words to those paragraphs. One sentence slipped in as a rider on some must-pass omnibus bill would do it: “Section 102(2)(B) is amended to add ‘or civil action under 17 USC §271’.”—voila, a nuclear weapon for patent trolls.

Then there’s the technological architecture. If SOPA passes, thousands of commercial ISPs, colleges, small businesses, nonprofits, and other entities that maintain domain servers are going to have to reconfigure their networks, potentially at substantial cost, in order to easily comply with the new law. There is an introductory clause in the latest version of the bill stipulating that no network operator will be required to implement a specific technology or redesign their networks in any particular manner in order to be considered in compliance. But let’s think realistically about what compliance will look like. Genuine “rogue sites” often operate via dozens of different domains, which means we’re apt to see regular updates to the government’s standing blacklist, potentially adding dozens or hundreds of domains in one go. Any sane network operator is just going to build a filter that reads off the current list of banned domains from a government feed and automatically stops resolving them. (This will, incidentally, be an enormously attractive attack surface for hackers: Spoof the SOPA feed—either at the source or to a particular provider—and you’ve got an instant bulk denial of service attack!)

Once the up-front costs of implementing that filter mechanism are paid, the marginal cost of additional censorship is effectively zero for the providers. It won’t much matter to the providers, at that point, whether the blacklist contains 10 domains or 10,000. The technology itself, needless to say, will be indifferent to the rationale for blacklisting. The filter will just automatically implement the list of domains it’s given; it won’t know or care whether they’re being blocked for hosting pirated movies, Hamas propaganda, or the Pentagon Papers.

These twin architectures will obliterate major institutional barriers to Internet censorship generally, not just censorship for antipiracy purposes. Political actors—or special interest groups—who want to expand the scope of blocking will no longer have to justify putting in place a wholly new system of Internet blocking. Instead, the rhetorical question will become: Now that we’ve got this whole filter architecture in place for music and movie pirates, how can we possibly justify not using it for sites that host terrorist propaganda or classified documents, for sites that implement a patented business model without permission, for sites enabling speech some U.S. court has held libelous, and for whatever new moral panic is gracing the cover of Time in five years. Surely you’re not suggesting that illicit downloads of Norbit are a bigger problem than whatever outrage Joe Lieberman is fulminating against this week, are you?

Changing legal and technological architectures also changes the costs of future political decisions that make use of those architectures. Speech is more likely to stay free when censorship isn’t. The cheaper the muzzle, the dimmer the prospects for online expression.

The office of Senator Tom Coburn (R‑OK) has released the 2011 edition of its annual “Wastebook.” The document spotlights 100 particularly ridiculous expenditures of taxpayer money from the past year. From an entertainment standpoint, it’s pure gold. But it’s also infuriating, depressing, and a painful reminder of what happens when politicians and bureaucrats spend other people’s money.

Here are my five “favorites”:

• $10 million for remake of “Sesame Street” for Pakistan (U.S. Agency for International Development). Osama bin Big Bird?
• $350,000 for an international art exhibit in Venice, Italy (State Department). To really appreciate this one, check out the pictures on page 21.
• An additional $175,587 to the University of Kentucky to study how cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail (National Institutes of Health). My guess: American quails couldn’t be used because the females are prone to getting a headache at the most inconvenient time.
• $592,527 for a study on why chimpanzees throw feces (National Institutes of Health). Perhaps NIH can fund a study on how cocaine affects the chimps’ aim.
• $150,000 for the American Museum of Magic in Michigan (Institute of Museum & Library Services). It ought to be relocated to Washington given the city’s unrivaled ability to make money disappear.

Yes, the money involved here amounts to pocket change in comparison to the $3.7 trillion the federal government spent last year. But as Coburn asks in the introduction, “Do these initiatives match your understanding of the role of the federal government as outlined by the Enumerated Powers of the U.S. Constitution?” Worthy or not, very little of what the federal government spends money on comports with the Founders’ vision of a national government that was to be strictly limited in its scope. That the money is often poorly spent is proof that their intentions were wise.

Check out Down​siz​ing​Gov​ern​ment​.org for more information on many of the agencies and programs cited in the Coburn report.

Entrepreneur Richard Branson has just blogged about his recent trip to Portugal where he was investigating that country’s drug policies. Branson cites Cato’s landmark study, “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal,” several times in his post. Here’s an excerpt:

I will set out clearly what I learned from my visit to Portugal and would urge other countries to study this:

In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.

Jail time was replaced with offer of therapy. (The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is much more expensive than treatment).

Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker, and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail. 

Critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country has some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. The recently realised results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise. …

Portugal’s 10 year experiment shows clearly that enough is enough. It is time to end the war on drugs worldwide. We must stop criminalising drug users. Health and treatment should be offered to drug users – not prison. Bad drugs policies affect literally hundreds of thousands of individuals and communities across the world. We need to provide medical help to those that have problematic use – not criminal retribution.

Read the whole thing. Check out the recent Cato conference on the Global War on Drugs here.