US Government tries to restrict publication of details on avian flu virus

While censorship can slow the spread of "evil ideas", as with nuclear weapons, attempts like these miss the fundamental cause, and stops education on how to deal with a potential biological attack. The childish example analogy is Dark Arts in Harry Potter: "Professor, how can we defend against the dark arts if we don't know what they are?"

What bothers me is a tendency to segregate knowledge into "too dangerous for citizen consumption" and "certified innocuous". Segregations like these don't just keep people out of the know - they have the perverse effect of stunting growth on those within the special circle [1], as people in the know write off anyone without their clearance level as incompetent, or lacking sufficient knowledge to make an informed decision.

[1] http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-...

These restrictions remind of ITAR. Building a rocket for a hobby? Never talk to foreigners about it, lest they make nuclear rockets. If that doesn't faze you, remember that USA almost stopped ecommerce because of ITAR banning export of cryptography that was once declare a munition. Because they didn't want foreigners to have access to encryption research.

What will happen is that honest people will follow the government and suffer from lack of potential discoveries while foreigners have their own avian flu virus studies, including 'mutations' that the US Government can be unprepared for.

To be clear: this is a request to the journals, the journals haven't decided what to do with it yet.