Government Secrecy

Susan Maret

Emerald

This book can be opened with

Hardback

9780857243898

26 January 2011

$228.99

eBook (PDF)

9780857243904

26 January 2011

$224.99

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Description
Contents

Government secrecy (GS) is a significant social, political, and policy issue and often presents as a barrier to civic participation, public right-to-know, historical understanding, and institutional accountability. This volume examines GS in a variety of contexts, including comparative examination of government control of information, new definitions, categories, censorship, ethics, and secrecy's relationship with freedom of information and transparency. It investigates GS in terms of its current theoretical descriptions as power over and concealment of information (Bok 1983), a 'tampering of communications' (Friedrich 1972), the 'compulsory withholding of knowledge, reinforced by the prospects of sanctions for disclosure' (Shils), or Georg Simmel's (1906) idea of secrecy creating the 'possibility of a second world'. Following the introduction this book is divided into the following six sections: Government Secrecy: Theoretical Musings; Government Secrecy and the Media; Government Secrecy and Technology; Freedom of Information; Government Secrecy: Current Policy; and Ethics. Articles are sourced from around the world and include some from USA, Mexico, Africa, Israel and Britain.

List of Contributors. Introduction: Government secrecy. Part I Musings on secrecy, privacy, censorship, and conspiracy. Sigmund Freud as a theorist of government secrecy. Privacy and secrecy: Public reserve and the handling of the BP Gulf oil disaster. Taxonomy of concepts related to the censorship of history. Secrecy and disclosure: Policies and consequences in the American experience. Government secrecy and conspiracy theories. Part II Government secrecy and national security. The Israeli paradox: The military censorship as a protector of the freedom of the press. National security, secrecy and the media – a British view. Project censored international: Colleges and universities validate independent news and challenge global media censorship. Operation Pedro Pan: The hidden history of 14,000 Cuban children. Part III Government secrecy: current policy. Secrecy reform or secrecy redux? Access to information in the Obama administration. Secrecy, complicity, and resistance: Political control of climate science communication under the Bush–Cheney administration. Suspicious activity reporting: U.S. domestic intelligence in a postprivacy age?. Classifying knowledge, creating secrets: Government policy for dual-use technology. Statecrafting ignorance: Strategies for managing burdens, secrecy, and conflict. Corruption, secrecy, and access-to-information legislation in Africa: A cross-national study of political institutions. Mexico's transparency reforms: Theory and practice. Part IV Government secrecy: Ethical tensions. Is open source intelligence an ethical issue?. “Open secrets”: The masked dynamics of ethical failures and administrative evil. The corrupting influence of secrecy on national policy decisions. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy. Research in Social Problems and Public Policy. Copyright page.