Official Secrecy Research Articles

Protecting ‘national security’ whistleblowers in the Council of Europe: an evaluation of three approaches on how to balance national security with freedom of expression

In its recent case law, the European Court of Human Rights has extended freedom of expression protection to whistleblowers, including those who work for the intelligence and security sector. Thus, contracting parties to the European Convention on Human Rights are required to balance any damage to national security caused by the disclosure, with the public interest in the information revealed, before handing down sanctions to the whistleblower for a breach of official secrecy. The article will identify, and critically evaluate, three possible approaches to balancing national security with the whistleblower's right to freedom of expression and the public interest in the disclosure of the information. These approaches are first, an absolute ban on external disclosures for intelligence officials; second, a broad exemption from criminal sanctions or other forms of retaliation when the interest in the information disclosed outweighs national security concerns; and finally, protection from reprisals provided only for specific disclosures or categories of wrongdoing, which are exhaustively enumerated in the law. It will examine the compatibility of each approach with nascent Council of Europe whistleblower protection standards and conclude that the final approach, in spite of its deficiencies, can best guarantee the whistleblower's right to free speech while ensuring that security is protected.

Censorship in Australia: Intrusions into media freedom flying beneath the international free expression radar

Australia has ranked among the top 30 nations in recent world press freedom surveys published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Freedom House and is broadly regarded as a substantially free Western liberal democracy. This article considers how the methodologies of those organisations assess the impact upon media freedom of a range of recent decisions and actions by Australian politicians, judges and government agencies. There is considerable evidence of a shift towards official secrecy and suppression of information flow. However, according to this analysis such developments are unlikely to impact significantly on Australia’s international ranking in media freedom indices. This article uses the methodologies of RSF and Freedom House to explore whether the international free expression organisations’ criteria are justifiably weighted towards violence against journalists, their imprisonment and formal anti-press laws and might allow for a nuanced comparison of other evidence of constraints on the news media in developed democracies.

‘Do We Still Need the CIA?’ Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Central Intelligence Agency and US Foreign Policy

AbstractIn May 1991, writing in the op‐ed column of the New York Times, the US Senator for New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called for the Central Intelligence Agency to be disbanded. Arguing that the CIA represented an historical anachronism that had outlived its usefulness to American foreign policy‐makers, Moynihan proposed that the Agency should be stripped of its autonomy and have its intelligence functions subsumed by the Department of State. Moynihan's rhetorical assault on the CIA marked the opening salvo in a protracted campaign that, over the following decade, until his death in March 2003, would see the one‐time member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence lobby relentlessly for reform of America's intelligence community and against pervasive official secrecy. To date, Moynihan's evangelical fervour in championing a more open intelligence paradigm, which came to incorporate the drafting of congressional bills, the chairmanship of a bipartisan commission on government secrecy, the publication of a book, and innumerable speeches and articles, has been interpreted in a narrow personal and political context. Commentators have tended to characterize Moynihan's turn against the CIA, and towards government transparency as symptomatic of individual eccentricity, disenchantment with purported Agency excesses during the Reagan administration, and ill‐judged post‐Cold War hubris. This article breaks new ground by reframing and reperiodizing Moynihan's relationship with intelligence. It suggests that Moynihan's attitudes to intelligence and state secrecy were formulated much earlier than has hitherto been acknowledged, and in an environment far removed from Washington's corridors of power. Specifically, the essay relocates Moynihan's emergence as an advocate of intelligence reform in the global political turmoil of the early 1970s when, as Richard Nixon's ambassador to India, he was afforded ample scope to assess the CIA's utility as an instrument of American diplomacy.

The sound of silence: Power, secrecy, and international audiences in US military basing negotiations

Why do leaders draw attention to some cooperative security negotiations but shroud others in secrecy? Previous scholarship focuses on leaders’ efforts to gain better terms of agreement either by playing their cards close to the vest at the bargaining table or by leveraging/avoiding aroused public opinion at home. Yet, in many cases, it is neither dyadic nor domestic political pressures that motivate leaders’ decisions to publicly acknowledge or conceal the occurrence of talks. This article suggests, instead, that third-party states often constitute the primary targets of official secrecy and that a state’s international power position shapes its decision to conceal or acknowledge military cooperation by affecting the size and attentiveness of international audiences, the types of assets it brings to the relationship and the benefits it seeks from cooperation. I test five hypotheses about leaders’ use of secrecy and acknowledgment through a statistical analysis of an original dataset on US overseas military basing negotiations. This analysis produces strong support for my argument.

White-collar and corporate crime in China: a comparative analysis of enforcement capacity and non-issue making

Research in China on the subject of white-collar and corporate crime, as in most countries, has been sparse due to the lack of large and systematic data sources and a related general unwillingness to fund major studies [58]. As a result, the occurrence of such offenses often remains under a cloak of official secrecy for at least two reasons: First, governments do not like to broadcast an image of their country as riddled with upper-class law-breaking, and second, the very officials themselves may well be involved in illegal schemes and they do not desire to alert the public to wrongdoing in other high places. Corruption, a universal institutional phenomenon, is especially pervasive in developing and transitional societies [81, 88]. As a growing superpower and the most populous country in the world, according to some sources, China has experienced both unprecedented economic development and attendant rampant corruption at all levels of government and the private sector [81]. “Whitecollar crime and official corruption in particular have been a serious concern in China and have attracted wide attention during the course of the nation’s economic reform” [83]. This paper will explore these issues through an examination of case studies and the application of theories and findings of past research on white-collar and corporate crime in other countries, primarily the U.S. Such a comparative framework has been noted as useful for unraveling similarities and differences in legal culture and ideology, statutory laws, enforcement patterns, legal procedures, court structures, and punishment systems that form the contexts or understanding crime and law generally and in different societies [22]. A major issue for China’s economy that has not garnered much scholarly attention, with the exception of corruption [12, 28, 33, 46, 71], involves what American academics refer to as white-collar and corporate crime. Corruption remains a central problem in China. Other business offenses, frauds against citizens as well as domestic Crime Law Soc Change (2013) 60:241–260 DOI 10.1007/s10611-013-9454-x

Weltpolizist Obama

When Barack Obama first came to power he was widely regarded as the perfect “anti-Bush”. However, in the field of US foreign policy, Obama has essentially continued to pursue Bush’s agenda, especially as regards the so-called “war on terror”. Although Obama’s government has abandoned this concept from the public discourse, it has conducted an aggressive policy: Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan and unleashed an unprecedented drone war which takes place under a veil of official secrecy. On Iran, Obama was not serious in his first term about starting a dialogue with Teheran and there is a great danger of war over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. Obama’s policy in the Middle East has not deviated from the position of previous US governments. While his foreign policy within a multilateral context seems to signal a departure from Bush’s unilateralism, Obama has successfully avoided from being portrayed as weak on national security matters by the Republicans.

Book Review: Freeing Speech: The Constitutional War over National Security by John Denvir

Freeing Speech: The Constitutional War over National Security. John Denvir. New York: New York University Press, 2010. 256 pp. $45 hbk. $20 pbk.I often read review copies of books when I'm traveling. I had planned to take my copy of Freeing Speech: The Constitutional War over National Security with me on some lengthy trips abroad in 2011.Then I hesitated. Would customs officials in countries like Azerbaijan look askance at a book with a title like that? What about reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have searched and seized, without a warrant, electronic devices like laptop computers belonging to U.S. citizens at border crossings- sometimes, at least according to lawsuits filed by the ACLU, with no apparent suspicion of wrongdoing other than supporting accused leaker Bradley Manning's legal defense fund?Not wishing to succumb to what the book's author, John Denvir, a constitutional policy professor at University of San Francisco School of Law, calls governmentinduced political passivity engendered by fear of attracting the unwanted attention of government investigators, I decided to take my chances and take the book along with me. I did, however, first remove the jacket, which includes a photograph of antiwar protestors on the cover. No point in being needlessly provocative, I figured.Denvir himself wouldn't hesitate to be provocative. His book certainly is. Right offthe bat, he claims that the same First Amendment that grants the press independence from government control has allowed presidents, who enjoy virtually unfettered access to the media, to utilize official secrecy coupled with propaganda techniques to mislead the public and mobilize support for their national security policies. This has led to what he calls the National Security Presidency, unchecked by Congress and the courts. The remedy he proposes would be for Congress to enact a law making it a felony for the president, vice president, or cabinet-level officials to utter false statements recklessly, or with knowledge that they are false-echoing the actual malice standard from the landmark First Amendment case, New York Times v. Sullivan.And that's just the beginning. Denvir manages to pack quite a few controversial concepts into his six short chapters, all predicated on the idea that the First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech, press, and assembly have been severely eroded by the so-called War on Terror. He provides brief histories of the First Amendment as well as the laws of access and provides chilling examples of increased surveillance of individuals and groups engaging in constitutionally protected activities, growing restrictions on access to government-held information, and missed opportunities by the federal courts to rein in zealous law enforcement officials because of excessive deference to their supposedly greater expertise.At the root of all this, he suggests, is the failure of the Supreme Court to interpret the First Amendment in a sufficiently robust way that not only encourages debate and dissent but curtails the expansion of executive power. …

Official Secrecy, Self-censorship and Political Parallelism: A Study on the Bangladesh Press

This article examines restrictions imposed on the press in the interest of Bangladesh security and public safety. It examines whether restrictions imposed by the laws and regulations seeking to protect State interests are reasonably justified in a democracy or not. It also examines how these laws inhibit the media’s quest to serve roles expected of them in a democracy. This article delineates inherited colonial regulations, the constitutional provisions related to the freedom of the press and its reasonable restrictions, oath of secrecy and defamation. This study also looks at partisan divisions and self-censorship in the press, official secrecy legislation and the proposed Right to Information Act.

What's wrong with this picture? The case of access to information requests in two continental federal states – Germany and Switzerland

More than 80 access to information (ATI) laws exist worldwide. Their primary objectives are to increase transparency and accountability in government. Given the similarity in the components of ATI laws across countries, one could expect per capita usage of the laws to be roughly similar. However, comparing the number of requests in seven countries, we found that far fewer requests are being made in Switzerland and Germany than in Canada, Ireland, Mexico, India, and the UK and that, in contrast to these five, the number is not increasing. Drawing on 28 semi-structured interviews with experts on the Swiss Law on Transparency (LTrans) and German FOI Law (IFG), we offer three primary explanations for the low use of the laws. The first is that few people are aware of the law in either country as a consequence of little promotion of the laws. The second is that people might have more interest in information held at the state or local level than at the federal level. The third is that other avenues to information in Switzerland reduce interest in using the LTrans and a culture of “ amtsgeheimnis”, or official secrecy, in Germany inhibits the administration from willingly disclosing information. We examine these hypotheses against the situation in the UK, where awareness of the FOI law is known to be high and the number of requests is high and has been on the rise for the past four years.

The Inverse Relationship between Secrecy and Privacy

In civil libertarian discourse, the inverse relationship between government secrecy and privacy is well recognized and widely acknowledged - so widely, in fact, that it can come to seem as though we might regain sufficient privacy simply by cabining official secrecy. But regimes of secrecy that insulate private-sector data processing practices also contribute materially to the decline of privacy, and indeed play a vital role in facilitating government efforts to make citizens' lives transparent. In addition, there is an inverse relationship between openness and privacy that we are inclined to resist discussing. When, for example, a government agency posts on its website documents containing private information about individual citizens, or when a social networking service establishes default rules for transmitting information from member pages to commercial partners, openness contributes materially to the exposure that people experience. Our public discourse about information policy reinforces the devaluation of privacy in two opposite but mutually-reinforcing ways, by valorizing political economies organized around secrecy and by elevating openness as an ultimate good. The shelter that privacy affords for self-development is essential to a healthy democracy. It is therefore important to interrogate both our regimes of secrecy and our discourses about openness.

Bomb power: the modern presidency and the national security state

A groundbreaking examination of how the atomic bomb profoundly altered the nature of American democracy. Look out for a new book from Garry Wills, What the Qur'an Meant, coming fall 2017. In Bomb Power, bestselling author Garry Wills presents a blistering critique of excessive executive power and official secrecy, drawing a direct line from the Manhattan Project to the usurpations of George W. Bush. He reveals how the atomic bomb transformed our nation down to its deepest constitutional roots-by dramatically increasing the power of the modern presidency and redefining the government as a national security state-leaving us in a state of continuous war alert for nearly seven decades. Bold and incisive, Bomb Power casts the history of the postwar period in a new light and sounds an alarm about the continued threat to our Constitution.

J.C. Masterman and the Security Service, 1940–72

The significance of J.C. Masterman's relationship with the Security Service, MI5, has not been fully appreciated. As a junior officer during World War II, he consistently sought to achieve good working relations with the Secret Intelligence Service. After the war he continued to take an interest in the Security Service and worked closely with other MI5 elder statesmen to ensure that the successor to Percy Sillitoe as Director-General came from within the Service. Masterman always hoped that his account of the double agents run by British Intelligence during World War II would one day be published. As the public image of the British secret services deteriorated during the 1960s, Masterman believed that MI5 did not grasp how his book could promote its interests, and so he insisted on forcing through publication anyway. The correspondence from serving and former MI5 officers in Masterman's papers vividly illustrate changing attitudes to official secrecy and the declining ability of the British Government to enforce it.

When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. By W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 278p. $22.50 cloth, $15.00 paper.

It takes a vacuum for the American mainstream press to seize an opening to perform its vital role. And it takes a crack in what the authors portray as an edifice of official secrecy, lying, intimidation, and retribution for the mainstream press to do its job—holding public officials to standards of accountability.

2. Chernobyl's Public Health Consequences

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas--comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination--revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.

Chapter II. Consequences of the Chernobyl Catastrophe for Public Health

Problems complicating a full assessment of the effects from Chernobyl included official secrecy and falsification of medical records by the USSR for the first 3.5 years after the catastrophe and the lack of reliable medical statistics in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Official data concerning the thousands of cleanup workers (Chernobyl liquidators) who worked to control the emissions are especially difficult to reconstruct. Using criteria demanded by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) resulted in marked underestimates of the number of fatalities and the extent and degree of sickness among those exposed to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Data on exposures were absent or grossly inadequate, while mounting indications of adverse effects became more and more apparent. Using objective information collected by scientists in the affected areas—comparisons of morbidity and mortality in territories characterized by identical physiography, demography, and economy, which differed only in the levels and spectra of radioactive contamination—revealed significant abnormalities associated with irradiation, unrelated to age or sex (e.g., stable chromosomal aberrations), as well as other genetic and nongenetic pathologies.In all cases when comparing the territories heavily contaminated by Chernobyl's radionuclides with less contaminated areas that are characterized by a similar economy, demography, and environment, there is a marked increase in general morbidity in the former. Increased numbers of sick and weak newborns were found in the heavily contaminated territories in Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia.Accelerated aging is one of the well‐known consequences of exposure to ionizing radiation. This phenomenon is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all of the populations contaminated by the Chernobyl radionuclides.This section describes the spectrum and the scale of the nonmalignant diseases that have been found among exposed populations. Adverse effects as a result of Chernobyl irradiation have been found in every group that has been studied. Brain damage has been found in individuals directly exposed—liquidators and those living in the contaminated territories, as well as in their offspring. Premature cataracts; tooth and mouth abnormalities; and blood, lymphatic, heart, lung, gastrointestinal, urologic, bone, and skin diseases afflict and impair people, young and old alike. Endocrine dysfunction, particularly thyroid disease, is far more common than might be expected, with some 1,000 cases of thyroid dysfunction for every case of thyroid cancer, a marked increase after the catastrophe. There are genetic damage and birth defects especially in children of liquidators and in children born in areas with high levels of radioisotope contamination. Immunological abnormalities and increases in viral, bacterial, and parasitic diseases are rife among individuals in the heavily contaminated areas. For more than 20 years, overall morbidity has remained high in those exposed to the irradiation released by Chernobyl. One cannot give credence to the explanation that these numbers are due solely to socioeconomic factors. The negative health consequences of the catastrophe are amply documented in this chapter and concern millions of people.The most recent forecast by international agencies predicted there would be between 9,000 and 28,000 fatal cancers between 1986 and 2056, obviously underestimating the risk factors and the collective doses. On the basis of I‐131 and Cs‐137 radioisotope doses to which populations were exposed and a comparison of cancer mortality in the heavily and the less contaminated territories and pre‐ and post‐Chernobyl cancer levels, a more realistic figure is 212,000 to 245,000 deaths in Europe and 19,000 in the rest of the world. High levels of Te‐132, Ru‐103, Ru‐106, and Cs‐134 persisted months after the Chernobyl catastrophe and the continuing radiation from Cs‐137, Sr‐90, Pu, and Am will generate new neoplasms for hundreds of years.A detailed study reveals that 3.8–4.0% of all deaths in the contaminated territories of Ukraine and Russia from 1990 to 2004 were caused by the Chernobyl catastrophe. The lack of evidence of increased mortality in other affected countries is not proof of the absence of effects from the radioactive fallout. Since 1990, mortality among liquidators has exceeded the mortality rate in corresponding population groups. From 112,000 to 125,000 liquidators died before 2005—that is, some 15% of the 830,000 members of the Chernobyl cleanup teams. The calculations suggest that the Chernobyl catastrophe has already killed several hundred thousand human beings in a population of several hundred million that was unfortunate enough to live in territories affected by the fallout. The number of Chernobyl victims will continue to grow over many future generations.

Hope for health in Turkmenistan?

6 years ago, The Lancet drew attention to Turkmenistan,1 where President Saparmurat Niyazov's increasingly oppressive policies had extended to widespread closure of health and education facilities.2,3 Although the official secrecy was difficult to penetrate, we revealed a picture of an unfolding health crisis, subsequently reported by two courageous BBC journalists.4

The EGPA Study Group at 20: Reflections backwards, forwards, and sideways

I was not a founder member of the Permanent Study Group on Informatization in Public Administration, as it was then called. I joined it a few years later, in the early 1990s, and attended regularly for most years until the early 2000s. The Group’s 20th anniversary is a good time to look back and to look forward. I would like to do both, and to give my impressions and views of the Group. I would also like to look sideways, concerning the current situation of studies of privacy within the broader field covered by the Group. As a political scientist interested in public policy, I joined the Group because of my research and teaching involvement in the study of public administration and of the development of information practices which were likely to have a great impact on the public sector. I had begun to do research in this broad area, and had started to publish articles. My particular, more specialist, interest was in matters to do with public access to information and official secrecy, and with the protection of privacy. In the UK, the former had been more prominent in public debate than the latter as ‘information issues’, although in terms of the implications of informatisation, the question of privacy was probably more obviously relevant and, as it has turned out, especially important. Both sets of issues spoke to the changing relationship between citizens and the state, and therefore transcended the research questions of technical and managerial change that, quite properly, animated an interest in informatisation and that formed the basis of the cutting-edge research being done by the Group and its individual members. The development of electronic government, in which I had acquired what has become a lasting interest, was a central research focus for the Group and its members, and gave a great impetus to the Group’s emphasis on empirical and comparative research. So participation in the Group was, for me, one of the most important steps I could take in my own learning. It also proved to be a testing-ground for my own contributions, but this was sometimes frustrating as well, given the particular focus of the research in which I was involved, and in which the Group had little interest. The Group also served as a central node in a network of research relationships that ran across countries and levels of academic positions, so that it was easy to establish contacts outside the confines of the Group’s annual meetings. These networks connected to other kinds of formal relationship and institutional activity within Europe, and these have been of especial value to scholarship, as well as to my interests outside the privacy field. Overall, I believe that I have taken more from the Group than I have contributed, so I have accumulated a large debt. In this brief piece of retrospection, and in keeping with good privacy protection, I will not mention any creditors’ names, although there have been particular individuals whom I have regarded as my mentors in this general field of research. Some have been

Idealpolitik in Disguise: Israel, Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union, and the Nixon Administration, 1969–1974

the heyday of detente, in October 1972, US and Soviet officials signed a trade agreement that called for the extension of mostfavoured-nation status to the Soviet Union. The congressional debate over the legislation, needed to implement the agreement and which focused on the Soviet Union's stance on the emigration of Jews, led to the passing in December 1974 of the JacksonVanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974; it barred the extension of most-favoured-nation status to Communist countries that restricted the emigration of their citizens. The Richard M. Nixon administration fought tenaciously, if unsuccessfully, to forestall the amendment; the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, even postponed the departure of military resupplies to Israel during critical stages of the October War in part to try lever Israel and the US Jewish lobby into withdrawing their support of the amendment.1 The administration's failure damaged its credibility with the Soviet Union; thus, the amendment both reflected and contributed to the ending of detente.2 Within the context of the triangular relationship of Israel, the United States, and US Jewry, this article focuses on the determinants and character of Israel's stance on the issues of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union and response to the JacksonVanik amendment. Until recently, the veil of official secrecy, and emotion, blurred the historical picture. As Benjamin Pinkus explains, the first wave of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union, in the early 1970s, had numerous accoucheurs: Soviet Jewish dissidents, American Jews, Israeli officials, and even Kissinger vied to take the credit.3 Quarrels in the West about the wisdom of the JacksonVanik

Reconstructing the performance of the Iraqi economy 19502006: an essay with some hypotheses and many questions

This article addresses the fact that little is known about the performance of the Iraqi economy after the 1970s due to a number of reasons including great official secrecy, the impact of repeated wars and, most important of all, the system of disaggregated economic management put in place by the Bathi regime in which many important parts of the system were managed, off-budget, as discrete units. While acknowledging the great difficulties in reconstructing the overall effect of such a system, Owen suggests ways by which we might begin to understand its logic as a preliminary to the team effort needed to reconnect the economic history of the last thirty years with what went before. This, he argues, is vital not only for a proper study of Iraq's development effort but also as a benchmark against which to judge present efforts at economic reconstruction and recovery.

Official secrecy and the management of security records in the global age of terrorism and information

The information society ushered in a new era of information for the rural communities of Africa, including some disclosure of security records. However, the proliferations of terrorist attacks ever since the 2001 US, Twin Tower bombings have increasingly placed access to records under the radar screen. This paper places the cardinal archival tenant of “free access to information” under cross-examination and argues that as the security forces race against time to contain the bad boys there is need to revisit the antagonistic concepts of access and secrecy. In Africa, where the Anti-George Bush sentiments are high, such a suggestion runs the risk of out-right rejection. The correlation between access to information and a rise in terrorism should propel a paradigm shift in the way archivists interact with access and secrecy. Keywords : security records, disclosure, secrecy, security information ESARBICA Journal Vol. 24 2005: 37-42