Terrorists could harm hundreds of thousands of people by poisoning the U.S. milk supply, warns a study by Lawrence Wein, a CISAC faculty member, and Yifan Liu, and incoming CISAC fellow. The study analyzes milk's vulnerability to tampering and suggests that safeguards used voluntarily by some milk producers should be more widely adopted.

Besides raising a counter-terrorism policy issue--how milk might be better protected--the study reopened debate over how research publications can best guard against security risks while furthering the pursuit of knowledge. The National Academy of Sciences was set to publish the milk study in its journal "Proceedings" when the Department of Health and Human Services asked that the article be withheld, as it presented "a roadmap for terrorists." (See news coverage linked below.)

Before the journal decided to publish the research, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Wein, "Got toxic milk?" recommending that mandatory security measures be considered for milk processing.

In the Washington Post op-ed "Censoring science won't make us any safer" CISAC Fellow Laura Donohue discusses the science-security tensions raised in the controversy over publication of Wein's and Liu's research.