Letter: Blocking threats from the world blocks beneficial sharing

Editor,

When you put together the recent large-scale hacking of classified U.S. personnel data by the Chinese with the extraordinary number of Chinese nationals at American universities today, you see a blurring of the lines between researching for purposes of pure scholarship and malicious spying.

In that hack, the Chinese were allegedly looking for our spies operating in their country. But we spy on China well enough to tell that it is they who are spying. Then we have been known to block participation by Chinese scientists in international conferences held here, thereby stifling the growth of purely scientific and benign knowledge which can only happen these days if totally non-political research nerds can share discoveries and data openly without intimidating visits by national security agencies.

We have even blocked the mutual sharing of scholarly scientific findings, even for medical benefit, with tiny Cuba.

Of course, there is always our U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which suppresses free development of ideas abroad with claims of copyright violation and patent infringement. In a public university, what the heck are “intellectual property rights”? Yes, you get to patent even a life form here, you are going to restrict all kinds of life-saving treatments and developments abroad. Then we cry foul when these other countries engage in corporate espionage.

Arching over all these kinds of spying, like an all-seeing sky, is our National Security Agency, with few restrictions on its ability to gather information even in our sister continent of Europe. (e.g. Angela Merkel’s phone tapped). So stimulating competition among researchers at their universities and ours can be getting unfairly handicapped in favor of our researchers publishing first only because we learned of their results prematurely through academic espionage.

All these shenanigans are tangling up free flows of information across the globe among academics. The pernicious problem here is superpowers one-sidedly classifying discoveries in academia in the guise of national security, thereby making them selectively unavailable to added synergy from researchers in certain countries. This has the chilling effect that comes over some stoop-shouldered, lab-coated genius when she is aware that jingoist Big Brother is breathing down her shoulder.

The solution is for the world to think outside all these boxes with national boundaries as their walls. We must transcend toward oversight from a wizened committee of global elders who have seen how we humans have become more dangerous through escalating meta-levels of spying. Then a world parliament gets to allow the free exchange of research results so broadly and comprehensively, there would be no reason to spy on a researcher just because they are foreign, because we would then have a world in which national boundaries existing just to fight with other nations have been made porous through exchange for benign business and trade to the point of being dissolved.

Sincerely,

Arun Anand Ahuja

UNM student