Information Hazards and Biotechnology

Information hazards are defined as risks that arise from the dissemination of true information that may enable some agent to cause harm. The working group focused on cases where information potentially enabled significant irreversible harm but for which the possibility also existed of limiting or delaying access to that critical information. Discussion centered on key actors including funders, researchers and institutional review boards, regulators, and publishers. The group discussed each with reference to its authority and resources for mitigating information hazards, sources of uncertainty with respect to information on which decisions are based, and the extent that adaptive policies might improve handling of uncertainty. Several perverse points emerged: (1) Imposing limitations on access to information may alert potential malevolent actors to the existence of the very information that poses a hazard, (2) Security benefits of controlling information may be offset by adverse side effects, including slowing scientific advance, limiting development of applications, impeding oversight and self-policing, and empowering information controllers to advance their interests, (3) Deliberations on information hazards were complicated by the fact that reporting those very discussions could itself have constituted an information hazard. The good news is the bad news. In other domains, imposition of controls has garnered support only in the face of manifest disasters. In biosecurity, we fortunately have not yet had such a disaster. However, given the challenges involved with managing hazardous information, even if future events were to create the political will to implement information controls, it is not clear what those controls would be.