The politics of freedom of information - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The politics of freedom of information write by Ben Worthy. This book was released on 2017-02-10. The politics of freedom of information available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Why do governments pass freedom of information laws? The symbolic power and force surrounding FOI makes it appealing as an electoral promise but hard to disengage from once in power. However, behind closed doors compromises and manoeuvres ensure that bold policies are seriously weakened before they reach the statute book. The politics of freedom of information examines how Tony Blair's government proposed a radical FOI law only to back down in fear of what it would do. But FOI survived, in part due to the government's reluctance to be seen to reject a law that spoke of 'freedom', 'information' and 'rights'. After comparing the British experience with the difficult development of FOI in Australia, India and the United States – and the rather different cases of Ireland and New Zealand – the book concludes by looking at how the disruptive, dynamic and democratic effects of FOI laws continue to cause controversy once in operation.
Saving the Freedom of Information Act
Saving the Freedom of Information Act - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Saving the Freedom of Information Act write by Margaret B. Kwoka. This book was released on 2021-10-14. Saving the Freedom of Information Act available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Freedom of Information Act is vital for democratic accountability. Understanding who uses it is key to re-centering its oversight purposes.
Troubling Transparency
Troubling Transparency - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Troubling Transparency write by David E. Pozen. This book was released on 2018-08-07. Troubling Transparency available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.
The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on Central Government in the UK
The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on Central Government in the UK - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on Central Government in the UK write by R. Hazell. This book was released on 2010-08-11. The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on Central Government in the UK available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Based on interviews with officials, requesters and journalists, as well as a survey of FOI requesters and a study of stories in the national media, this book offers a unique insight into how the Freedom of Information Act 2000 really works.
Baseless
Baseless - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Baseless write by Nicholson Baker. This book was released on 2020-07-21. Baseless available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. “Staggeringly good.” —Counterpunch A major new work, a hybrid of history, journalism, and memoir, about the modern Freedom of Information Act—FOIA—and the horrifying, decades-old government misdeeds that it is unable to demystify, from one of America's most celebrated writers Eight years ago, while investigating the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker requested a series of Air Force documents from the early 1950s under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Years went by, and he got no response. Rather than wait forever, Baker set out to keep a personal journal of what it feels like to try to write about major historical events in a world of pervasive redactions, witheld records, and glacially slow governmental responses. The result is one of the most original and daring works of nonfiction in recent memory, a singular and mesmerizing narrative that tunnels into the history of some of the darkest and most shameful plans and projects of the CIA, the Air Force, and the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. In his lucid and unassuming style, Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early fifties that aimed to achieve "an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date." Along the way, he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease, leaflet bombs filled with feathers, suicidal scientists, leaky centrifuges, paranoid political-warfare tacticians, insane experiments on animals and humans, weaponized ticks, ferocious propaganda battles with China, and cover and deception plans meant to trick the Kremlin into ramping up its germ-warfare program. At the same time, Baker tells the stories of the heroic journalists and lawyers who have devoted their energies to wresting documentary evidence from government repositories, and he shares anecdotes from his daily life in Maine feeding his dogs and watching the morning light gather on the horizon. The result is an astonishing and utterly disarming story about waiting, bureaucracy, the horrors of war, and, above all, the cruel secrets that the United States government seems determined to keep forever from its citizens.
