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Paper – The Implausibility of Secrecy

The Implausibility of Secrecy, by Mark Fenster. University of Florida – Fredric G. Levin College of Law. February 18, 2013

  • “Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events — among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s celebrated leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters — undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, open sources — each of these constitutes a path out of the government’s informational clutches. As a result, permanent, long-lasting secrecy of any sort and to any degree is costly and difficult to accomplish. This article argues that information control is an implausible goal. It critiques some of the foundational assumptions of constitutional and statutory laws that seek to regulate information flows, in the process countering and complicating the extensive literature on secrecy, transparency, and leaks that rest on those assumptions. By focusing on the functional issues relating to government information and broadening its study beyond the much-examined phenomenon of leaks, the article catalogs and then illustrates in a series of case studies the formal and informal means by which information flows out of the state.”
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