Military historians observe that the losing armies were the ones that were only prepared to fight the last war, failing to change their tactics and strategies to deal with current warfare. Today, environmental groups and U.S. industries continue to war over the public dissemination of process details and chemical formulations regarding the environmental consequences of industrial facilities. Information confidentiality disputes relating to the environment present a classic political science, economic, and philosophical conflict among competing values. While these "last wars" were based on the industry's fixation on the physical security of their data, the shape of information disputes in 2000 forward is likely to be dramatically different.

The development of corporate technological advancements through commercial research greatly benefits U.S. trade through licensing income and product export sales. For years, protection of that technology has been enhanced by safeguards such as physical security, cryptographic protection, and contractual constraints on employees with access to data. When regulators began to acquire large quantities of industrial secrets, industry applied similar constraints and won the courts' approval.¹ But is industry fighting the last war and missing the Internet's effects on the instant transferability of data that is shared with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)?