Many breathless things have been written and said about WikiLeaks since the organization first released that startling video in 2010 of an Army helicopter over Baghdad firing on civilians. The site went on to drop hundreds of thousands of American diplomatic and defense documents that year. Amid all that raw data, WikiLeaks’ supporters and media theorists on multiple continents suggested we were now entering a new era of transparency — one in which secrecy might be dead. “All of this,” concludes legal scholar Alasdair Roberts in a new paper, “is vastly overwrought.” Roberts, ... Read More
Pirate Party Docks at Berlin’s Parliament
January 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The recent U.S. shutdown of the Hong Kong-based file-hosting service Megaupload has led other file sharing sites to tighten their content sharing practices, for fear of facing criminal charges. Seven of Megaupload’s executives were charged with copyright violations, racketeering, and money laundering, while CEO Kim Dotcom, a German-Finnish citizen, was arrested along with four others and could face up to 55 years in prison. Hackers have retaliated, leading some, like the ubiquitous “Anonymous,” to claim credit for attacking the Justice Department's website. But while pirating ... Read More
Making a Case for Televising the Supreme Court
November 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Over the years, media advocacy groups and news outlets have jotted off letters to the Supreme Court pleading for a basic form of access their counterparts in other democracies already have: cameras in the country’s highest courtroom. The response has always been the same, but with varying explanations. Cameras would be too obtrusive. The wires and equipment would get in everyone’s way. Filming the court would turn it into a circus. The whole demeanor of the place would change. Justice David Souter summed up all of this with a jurist’s eloquence: “I can tell you the day you see a ... Read More
Give Me a Receipt Next Time I Pay Taxes
July 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
One common misperception about how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars popped up last week during the president's Twitter town hall. In response to Obama's own query into cyberspace about what costs America should trim to reduce the deficit, Elizabeth from Chicago suggested we "stop giving money to countries that waste it." "You know..." Obama began, tapping into the professorial tone he often uses to disarm political memes. "I think it's important for people to know that foreign aid accounts for less than 2 percent of our budget. And if you defined it just narrowly as the kind ... Read More
Taming the U.S. Government’s Secrecy Machine
May 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Nixon Presidential Library plans in June to officially release the Pentagon Papers, the 7,000-page secret history of the Vietnam War that was famously first published, in part, by The New York Times in 1971. In the four decades since, the document has been the focus of innumerable newspapers articles, dozens of books — including both complete versions of the actual text itself — and even a couple of movies. But until now, the Pentagon Papers have never been formally declassified by the government originally responsible for writing them. This odd fact underscores the convoluted ... Read More
WikiLeaks and the Future of Whistle-blowing
May 2, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Mark Stephens, the British attorney for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is traveling to the United States this week for a debate hosted by Index on Censorship and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism on the impact of the whistle-blowing site for journalism, national security and government secrecy. The event, set for Wednesday night in New York, is open to the public. (The Idea Lobby’s Emily Badger is also the U.S. editor for Index.) The panel, chaired by Index’s chief executive, John Kampfner, will also include investigative journalist and security services expert ... Read More
U.S. Government Begins Human Rights Website
April 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Michael Posner, the State Department’s assistant secretary in charge of human rights, met this week with nongovernmental organizations to talk about the department’s annual report, released April 8, on the state of human rights around the world. As part of the meeting, officials also toured a new platform where advocates can access the report — a Web portal, humanrights.gov, that went online this past week. The project is part of the State Department’s response to President Obama’s Open Government Directive, a push to make public information across all agencies more accessible ... Read More
Federal Budget Cuts May Cloud Government Transparency Websites
April 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Over the last few years, the federal government has spent $8.3 million on the public information clearinghouse data.gov, and another $13.3 million on the website USASpending.gov, which allows citizens to track public investments in everything from the Gulf oil spill cleanup to higher education grants. How do we know how much those open-government platforms have cost? Because of another transparency initiative — the IT Dashboard — which specifically monitors the progress of the government's many information technology efforts. Most of the money that supports these programs, however, ... Read More
The Ultra-Imperial Presidency
December 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Back in 2006, Bruce Ackerman co-authored the "Liberal Manifesto," a document of protest signed by dozens of prominent intellectuals who condemned the "illegal, unwise and destructive" Iraq war and the "politics of panic" of the administration of President George W. Bush. But Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale and the author of the new book The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, is worried about more than one unenlightened man in power. He believes that a runaway U.S. presidency could someday be the springboard for an authoritarian takeover. He wants to shake ... Read More
Curses, FOIA’d Again
March 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In one of his first acts the day he settled into office last January, Barack Obama issued a memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, the 1966 federal law requiring the disclosure of most public documents that has been variously applied by every administration since. Bush-era Attorney General John Ashcroft famously interpreted the law to suggest agencies should err on the side of denying records requests that might interfere with national security, privacy or any of FOIA's nine exemptions. The Department of Justice, he said, would defend agencies' decisions to withhold material "unless ... Read More
