(Press-News.org) London, UK (March 15th, 2011) – WikiLeak's disclosures highlight longstanding problems of the overclassification of information and failure of transparency laws, says David L Sobel.
When Barack Obama took office as president in January 2009, he identified transparency as one of the highest priorities on his agenda for change. Writing in the current issue of Index on Censorship, David L Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US, suggests that the president's early promises remain unfulfilled. He argues that, with the US government's failure to deliver on its commitment to openness, leaks are one of the few means of holding government to account.
Sobel's article, The urge to classify, suggests that overclassification of information and the failure of transparency laws to operate in an effective manner both contribute to an environment in which unauthorised disclosures – like the WikiLeaks revelations – are more likely to occur.
Setting out the findings of Daniel Patrick Moyhihan, who chaired the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy in the mid-90s, and more recently the September 11 investigation chaired by Thomas Kean, Sobel notes: "There is no question that the security classification system is (to put it charitably) badly broken and that a vast amount of important, but innocuous, information is improperly withheld." He notes that "overuse of the 'secret' stamp can be counter-productive and actually weaken the protection of truly confidential information".
Sobel's article appears in The Net Effect – the March issue of Index on Censorship, exploring the impact of digital media on free speech. In other articles, acclaimed commentator Evgeny Morozov considers the political interests at stake in bringing the internet under control, writing: "When some representatives of the US government seek to remake the internet to make it easier to spy on its users, while others complain about similar impulses in China or Iran, this makes the US government look extremely hypocritical." Index also reports on the ground-breaking events in Egypt: Jillian C York writes about the role of social media in the protests and Salwa Ismail analyses the background to the revolution.
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The Net Effect is the latest issue of Index on Censorship, issue 40(1), published today (15th March, 2011) by SAGE.
Selected content from this issue will be available for free from the Index website. See http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/03/the-net-effect/ for more information.
Launched in 1972, Index on Censorship is the only magazine devoted to protecting and promoting free expression.
For further information contact natasha@indexoncensorship.org
Tel: 020 7324 2522
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. www.sagepublications.com
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Mohave County and its major areas of Kingman, Bullhead City, and Lake Havasu City are especially vulnerable to the poor economic times facing our country. Recently the Kingman Daily Miner reported that the Kingman and Lake Havasu areas had an unemployment rate of 10.2%, this is higher than the Arizona average of 9.4%. The biggest problem with this statistic is that it does not take in to account all the people that have either stopped looking for work or are underemployed.
There is currently an epidemic of of unemployment and underemployment in Kingman, Arizona, as well ...
The massive marketing campaigns launched by publishing houses at the start of the academic year can cause people bound to suffer obsessive-compulsive disorder to develop this pathology before. The fact is that collecting articles without control is a symptom of this serious psychological disorder –one of which most known variants is Diogenes syndrom– and of shopping addiction. These are two mental disorders affecting approximately 12% of the population.
Porcelain dolls, precious stones, world thimbles, watches, fans, dinosaurs, language courses, and tanks and ships in ...
Minneapolis, MN —March 15, 2011—A new study from the Journal of Marriage and Family shows that contrary to popular anxieties about slacker young adults who refuse to grow up, or indulgent parents who stifle their adult children's development by continuing to support them, there is evidence that parental assistance in early adulthood promotes progress toward autonomy and self-reliance.
Study author Teresa Swartz, "The fact that young people depend so heavily upon their parents well beyond the age when most people from earlier generations had already started families and ...
Leuven - Jean-Christophe Marine (VIB, K.U.Leuven) strongly argues against the use of Cop1-inhibitory drugs. The protein Cop1 has –for a long time - been seen as an attractive drug target for cancer. But Jean-Christophe Marine found out that Cop1 acts as a tumor suppressor, and thus inhibits tumor formation. His new data will have direct implications for the development of cancer drug targets.
Tumorigenesis: loss of control
Tumors form when control over the cell division is lost; a process that could be compared to losing control over the speed of your car. Two main players ...
It is every patient's worst nightmare: to wake up in the recovery room after surgery to learn that something went wrong. In some cases, the bad outcome is simply a matter of chance: one of the known risks of the surgery happened to occur. But in other cases, the bad outcome is the direct result of the negligence of the physician performing the surgery and was entirely avoidable.
Surgical mistakes happen much more often than most Americans realize. Sometimes these mistakes are minor and may never cause any harm to the patients, but this is not always the case. According ...
BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL, March 15, 2011– Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have shown that a significant number of patients with benign prostate enlargement (BPE) may have Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), which may be the reason for their night awakenings and urination.
This study compared men between the ages of 55 and 75 who were randomly sampled from primary care clinics, diagnosed with BPE and reported nocturia at least once nightly. The comparison control group had no BPE and one or no nocturia episodes per night.
According to the new study published ...
MANHATTAN, KAN. -- It's a cloak that surpasses all others: a microscopic carbon cloak made of graphene that could change the way bacteria and other cells are imaged.
Vikas Berry, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Kansas State University, and his research team are wrapping bacteria with graphene to address current challenges with imaging bacteria under electron microscopes. Berry's method creates a carbon cloak that protects the bacteria, allowing them to be imaged at their natural size and increasing the image's resolution.
Graphene is a form of carbon ...
Alexandria, VA - Black carbon - fine particles of soot in the atmosphere produced from the burning of fossil fuels or biomass - a major contributor to the thick hazes of pollution hovering over cities around the world, has been known to be a health hazard for decades. But over the last decade, scientists have been examining in increasing detail the various ways in which these particles contribute to another hazard: heating up the planet.
Black carbon's impact on climate is not cut-and-dried, however, as EARTH explores in "Still in a Haze: What We Don't Know About Black ...
TORONTO, On — March 15, 2011 — Minor league hockey players in the Atom division are more than 10 times likely to suffer a brain injury since bodychecking was first allowed among the 9 and 10-year-olds, says a study led by St. Michael's Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano.
The findings, published online in the journal Open Medicine, add to the growing evidence that bodychecking holds greater risk than benefit for youth and support widespread calls to ban the practice.
According to the researchers, led by Cusimano, director of the Injury Prevention Research Centre ...
University Park, Pa. -- Children of immigrants are more likely to live in households headed by two married parents than children of natives in their respective ethnic groups, according to Penn State sociologists.
This intact family structure may offer immigrant children economic and social advantages that help them adapt to their new country, according to Nancy Landale, professor, sociology and demography.
"An intact family is a positive family arrangement because it maximizes the resources available to children," said Landale. "The family is the main source of children's ...
