“Bullets Of Truth”: Julian Assange And The Politics Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Dec 2018
“Bullets Of Truth”: Julian Assange And The Politics Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
This essay updates (to early 2019) earlier work on the WikiLeaks story in order to consider what more recent developments reveal about the theoretical promise that Assange articulated at the time of the website’s emergence. Assange has characterized secrecy as both a form and symptom of corruption, and ultimately as the foundation of a “conspiracy” of governance that states like the U.S. inflict on their subjects and the world. He advocates a non-political, vigilante form of transparency in which WikiLeaks serves as a neutral entity that will save the public and free the world with information. He predicted that corrupt …
Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster
Dec 2018
Feed: State Transparency Amidst Informational Surplus, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
An email arrives, promising inside information about the perfidious forces that secretly rule the nation. A Twitter feed from a prominent insider at an establishment think-tank announces the latest disclosure about the president’s secret role in the Russian conspiracy to manipulate the election that elevated him with the blast of toy cannon. Meanwhile, the President’s tweets serve to annoy, distract, humor, or comfort those who see them, and they above all announce some truth about his presidency.
Debates about government transparency presume that the state controls an informational spigot, which can be made to allow information to flow or to …
How Different Are Young Adults From Older Adults When It Comes To Information Privacy Attitudes & Policies?, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, Joseph Turow
Jan 2018
How Different Are Young Adults From Older Adults When It Comes To Information Privacy Attitudes & Policies?, Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, Joseph Turow
Chris Jay Hoofnagle
Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.” Surprisingly, though, few empirical investigations have explored the privacy attitudes of young adults. This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults’ attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced than portrayed in the …
Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster
Feb 2012
Disclosure's Effects: Wikileaks And Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
Constitutional, criminal, and administrative laws regulating government transparency, and the theories that support them, rest on the assumption that the disclosure of information has transformative effects: disclosure can inform, enlighten, and energize the public, or it can create great harm or stymie government operations. To resolve disputes over difficult cases, transparency laws and theories typically balance disclosure’s beneficial effects against its harmful ones. WikiLeaks and its vigilante approach to massive document leaks challenge the underlying assumption about disclosure’s effects in two ways. First, WikiLeaks’s ability to receive and distribute leaked information cheaply, quickly, and seemingly unstoppably enables it to bypass …
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Dec 2004
The Opacity Of Transparency, Mark Fenster
Mark Fenster
The normative concept of transparency, along with the open government laws that purport to create a transparent public system of governance promise the world—a democratic and accountable state above all, and a peaceful, prosperous, and efficient one as well. But transparency, in its role as the theoretical justification for a set of legal commands, frustrates all parties affected by its ambiguities and abstractions. The public’s engagement with transparency in practice yields denials of reasonable requests for essential government information, as well as government meetings that occur behind closed doors. Meanwhile, state officials bemoan the significantly impaired decision-making processes that result …
