Some would ban research use or even mention of suspect or repatriated items. Smithsonian archaeologists are adjured not to refer at all to artifacts returned to tribal claimants. Already-published work on such items, like books once on the Papal Index, may some day be outlawed as profane. Libraries are already pressed to define acceptable users. Indeed, declassifying once-secret FBI and other materials to certain individuals ipso facto discriminates against all the rest of us.
Some cultures routinely cordon off precious data from outsiders, women, children, and other pariahs.
Data so circumscribed cease to be veridical because closed to general scrutiny. The age of open information may prove an aberrant episode in history. Before, only kings and chroniclers were privy to it, then scribes. Today, we agonize over what children should see and hear. In early April, schoolgirls were led away from a sexually explicit production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Stratford.