Sometimes? (Score 1)

The company I work for often receives data from, and shares data with, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The data we share is regarding the environment, specifically diesel emissions. Clearly the research benefits U.S. citizens and poses no security risk and should therefore be publicly available. But there are definitely cases where data should not be made public. Nuclear energy research, any weapons research, and combustion research could fall into that category amongst many others. Sure tax payers paid for it, but that does not mean that they should possess the data directly. There would be nothing stopping the average Joe from putting that data into the world domain. Then the world, who hasn't made any contribution to the research, financially or otherwise, now has this information that U.S. taxpayers footed the bill for.