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Government Openness and Government Secrecy
As we reach the end of the year, it is a good time to review government openness and transparency and secrecy. There are a number of reports and comments and relevant stories coming out this week that relate to this topic. Here are a few:
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
OMB watch has a useful wrap up in its 2006 Transparency Awards (December 19, 2006 Vol. 7, No. 25). They include The Best New Transparency Law, Warrantless Spying Program, Cutting Toxics Release Inventory Reporting, Closure of EPA Libraries, Proliferation of Sensitive But Unclassified Information Categories, National Archives’ Reclassification, Dismissal of Data Quality Act Case, Acceptance of Increased Use of State Secrets Privilege, and more.
Good news from USDA... and a public interest group
The Associated Press reports that the Department of Agriculture plans to release a database that reports who gets about $56 billion in subsidies (USDA discloses individual farm payments, by Libby Quaid, Yahoo / AP, Dec 19, 2006). It will take them time to do this, but a public interest group is already posting some of the data. The Environmental Working Group has at least two databases of public information, the Farm Subsidy Database and the U.S. Mining Database. These are noble efforts to remix government information and make it more accessible than the government itself does. Bravo! (Thanks to Ted for this story!)
More Good News: Britain will not invade U.S.! John Lennon didn't fund bookstore!
This week saw the release of the last few documents from the FBI's John Lennon files. The Los Angeles Times reports that among other secrets the government fought 25 years to conceal was the fact that two British leftists tried to get Lennon to "finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London" but that Lennon didn't. Why did the U.S want to hide this trivial information? It claimed that releasing it could result in "military retaliation against the United States." Really, that's what they claimed. We still don't know which government shared these secrets with the U.S, but the article says that it is very difficult to believe that it could be any government other than the United Kingdom. "I doubt that Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the U.S. in retaliation for the release of these documents" said historian, Jon Wiener. The ACLU is quoted as saying that the classification of these documents makes it seem that "...the head of document classification for the FBI must be (TV show satirst) Stephen Colbert." See FBI to release last of its John Lennon files, By Henry Weinstein Los Angeles Times (December 20, 2006). The documents will be posted on the Internet today at http://www.LennonFBIfiles.com
Mr. Vice-President: Are You Listening? Award
While Vice President Cheney continues to claim that the people can't know who he consulted when he worked on energy policy for the people (see Blow against open govt in Cheney case), at least one new member of Congress believes that openness is better than secrecy and is leading by example. The New York Times reports that "Representative-elect Kirsten Gillibrand has decided to post details of her work calendar on the Internet at the end of each day..." and comments that "For all the worthy proposals for ethics reform being hashed out by the incoming Congress, a heavy dose of Internet transparency should not be overlooked in the effort to repair lawmakers’ tattered credibility. The technology is already there, along with the public’s appetite for more disclosure about the byways of power in Congress." Congress and the Benefits of Sunshine, Editorial, The New York Times (December 14, 2006)
The YouTube Effect
Finally, an Op-Ed in today's Los Angles Times points out that the ability of citizens to make use of information and repost and remix it makes it harder for governments to lie and cover up misdeads. In The YouTube effect (Op-Ed, By Moisés Naím, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2006) Naím says that a video posted on YouTube disproves a Chinese government claim that soldiers shot Tibetan refugees in self-defense. He notes that "Governments are already feeling the heat of the YouTube effect -- and cracking down online. Almost a third of all reporters jailed this year were Internet journalists. The U.S. military recently ordered its soldiers to stop posting videos online. Iran's government restricts connection speeds to limit its people's access to video streaming." We might add that, if we lose Net Neutrality, we will increase the ability of the private sector and governments to filter and control what we see and who can see what.
What about Depository Libraries?
We stand at a crossroads. Technology provides many new possibilities for individuals and consumer groups and journalists and even politicians and governments to provide more access to more information to more people. But even as we see the possibilities, we see the battles getting tougher and governments going out of their way to control information. As OMB Watch says, The penchant for secrecy in the Bush administration "has pushed the pendulum far from openness and transparency."
As Government information specialists we help people find information, but we rely on tools that are provided by the government and the private sector. Our ability to provide service is both enhanced and constrained by the decisions of these others (our "partners" as we like to call them).
When we give up our collections in the hopes that others (GPO and government agencies) will keep content available, we abrogate our role in the flow of information from producer to user. When we do this we no longer actively select, acquire, organize, and preserve information, but hope others will. When we do this, we change from being an active part of the information flow to a passive spectator of what others do. When we do this, we base our services, not on our work, but on hope: on hope that others will value the same information that we and our users value and that they will do so for as long as we do; on the hope that others will never make choices to cover up, hide, remove, alter, or charge for information.
As much as we'd like to hope that the technology crossroads will lead to more openness, we know as we look back on the battles of the past year that we can't rely on that happening. As much as we'd like to hope that governments will be honest and open, we know they often will not. As much as we'd like to hope that governments will not base information decisions on budgets or politics, we know that all too often they do. As much as we'd like to hope that the private sector will do good things, we know that even the most altruistic among them don't promise to "do good" but promise to "do no evil" and that, by definition, they make decisions based on profitability, not altruism.
We know that "hope" is essential to what we do, but that "hope" is not a policy or a method. We know that we have to do more. We have to be active and fulfill our societal role of ensuring long term preservation and access and usability of government information. We can't do that by relying on others. It is our role to do that and doing less is a betrayal of the trust that our users place in us.
Government Secrecy in the Information Age
While it is easy for us to take government openness for granted and assume that government secrecy is an aberration, a new book that examines government secrecy world-wide warns us of dangers that exist today and identifies problems that we can see in the United States. From the publisher:
Roberts goes further than the popular view that secrecy is simply a problem of selfish bureaucrats trying to hide embarrassing information by showing how such powerful trends as privatization, globalization, and the "networking" of security agencies are complicating the fight against secrecy.
The book is Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age by Alasdair Roberts of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, New York, Cambridge University Press (January 2006, 334 pages).
We know about privatization of government information and this week we saw more about networking of security agencies when Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte submitted to Congress the Information Sharing Environment Implementation Plan (November 2006). This plan explicitly calls for "policies, processes, protocols and technology that enable the sharing of ["terrorist related"] information among federal, state, local, tribal and private sector entities, as well as our foreign partners." While this may seem a reasonable proposal in the abstract, it has two problems: First, it is not clear that the "terrorist related information" will always be information about terrorists; it may often be massive amounts of information on all citizens, which the government hopes to use to identify terrorists. Second, there is no proposal for sharing information with the public; that implies that this information will be shared and kept secretly -- exactly what Roberts discusses in his book.
Thanks to Secrecy News for the pointer to this book! Continue reading
Secret Laws
Can you be required to comply with a government policy or law that is itself secret? Although we are not allowed to see the law in question, at least we can see the court documents and amicus curiae briefs filed in the court case challenging this situation. See:
- Confronting Secret Law by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (November 15, 2006).
20061017 – No information on threats to America
From Statement on Signing the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (H.R. 5122), published on October 17, 2006 and put into October 30 Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents
A number of provisions in the Act call for the executive branch to furnish information to the Congress or other entities on various subjects. These provisions include sections 219, 313, 360, 1211, 1212, 1213, 1227, 1402, and 3116 of the Act, section 427 of title 10, United States Code, as amended by section 932 of the Act, and section 1093 of the Ronald W. Reagan National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2005 (Public Law 108-375) as amended by section 1061 of the Act. The executive branch shall construe such provisions in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the Executive, or the performance of the Executive's constitutional duties.The full text of the Act can be found on the HR 5122 bill page on Thomas. Some of the information the President proposes to withhold include:
- Sec. 313. Response plan for remediation of unexploded ordnance, discarded military munitions, and munitions constituents.
- Sec. 360. Energy efficiency in weapons platforms.
- Sec. 1211. North Korea. - This section requires an interagency review of policy towards North Korea and requires this report - (4) REPORT- Not later than 90 days after the date of the appointment of an individual as Coordinator under paragraph (1), the Coordinator shall submit to the President and Congress an unclassified report, with a classified annex if necessary, on the actions undertaken under paragraph (3). The report shall set forth--(A) the results of the review under paragraph (3)(A); and (B) any other matter on North Korea that the Coordinator considers appropriate.
- SEC. 1213. INTELLIGENCE ON IRAN. - This section requires a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, plus a "Presidential Report on Policy Objectives and United States Strategy Regarding Iran"
- Sec. 1402. Quarterly reports on Department of Defense response to threat posed by improvised explosive devices.
A bill you are not allowed to see or discuss??
Surely, I thought, they're not proposing passing a secret law. Surely they're not going to say that the citizenry isn't allowed to know what's in the law that Congress is considering. [but it turns out] ...I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it. Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?We've seen this before. Laws that are copyrighted or considered the property of a private company. (One comment to the Felten post above says that it is it's perfectly acceptable for the law to be private intellectual property in forty-seven states.) But this is worse. Felten says of a proposed law to "plug the analog hole":
"This is much worse than a claim of copyright. Copyright doesn't stop you from talking about what is in the document, or from rephrasing it in your own words. A copyrighted law can at least be debated. Here, they're claiming the (proposed) law is a trade secret and cannot be discussed at all."What are the implications? There are at least two: First, treatment of a bill as being proprietary could become a precedent for even more private control of what should be public information leading to even less access to information and even less government accountability. Second, the law itself deals with "a fundamental vulnerability in copy prevention schemes" (see: the analog hole WikiPedia) in a way that would effect the functionality of all hardware for all purposes -- even legal copying of public information (say files downloaded from govt. agencies) could, potentially, be disabled because of this. Continue reading
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