Illegal Knowledge?
I think our society is reaching the point where we have to make a very important decision. Is it illegal to publish or share knowledge on how to commit illegal acts? And if it is illegal to publish the knowledge, does that make it illegal to know? Where do you draw the line?
Recently, a college kid published a website that allowed people to print Northwest Airlines boarding passes that are good enough to fool security. Note that he didn't necessarily print any (although I assume he did when testing it) and he didn't try to get through airport security with one. He just published the tools that made it possible to print one. (Read more about it here: 27B Stroke 6.) Now a congressman thinks he should be arrested! Before you laugh, this has happened before. DVD Jon figured out how to play DVDs on his Linux box back in 2002 and he ended up in court over it. (Since then he's published info about iTunes and Windows video streaming.)
Obviously these are two different cases but neither one would have gotten any publicity if they hadn't published the "how-to." They didn't really get in trouble for doing what they did (who cares if Jon plays a DVD on his Linux box) – what they got in trouble for was sharing the knowledge with the world.
The first question to me is: do they have the right to the knowledge? Did Jon steal proprietary information by reverse engineering? Or was it public knowledge? The information the college kid used for the boarding passes is printed on every boarding pass.
The second question is: if you have knowledge that could be used to hurt others, can you share it? Or can the government restrict you from posting information about bomb building or boarding pass printing?
To me it's the second question that is really important and I definitely have an opinion on it. Knowledge should be shared. (Note that knowledge is not the same as personal information or data. You don't have the right to publish my bank info because that's my personal data, but if you can figure out how to hack into my bank, I think you should share that.) Not telling your kids how the bad guys can get them won't protect them from the bad guys. And the bad guys don't need you to tell them how to get your kids – they do that for a living and are willing to invest the time and effort to figure it out. Not telling people how to make boarding passes won't prevent terrorists from hijacking planes.
Knowledge should be shared so that we can all learn from it. Protecting knowledge or making knowledge illegal should not be our way of enforcing safety. It won't work and it hurts everyone.
[NOTE: I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY!]
