Airport fun (and 'security' in general)

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ 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Without Walls project because they are important historical
documents--and show that even during the height of the Cold War our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 Œsecurity,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
__________________________________________________________________


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