Review of "Government Information Management in the 21st Century: International Perspectives (original) (raw)
Related papers
Progress and problems in declassifying U.S. government records
Journal of Government Information, 2004
For the first time ever, Executive Order 12958 signed in 1995 established a process to greatly reduce the huge number of classified federal records accumulated since world war II. Although some progress was made under it, subsequent orders and legislation significantly decreased its effectiveness. The U.S. government must take certain actions now to reverse this trend.
DoD Historical Records Declassification Advisory Panel,(First Session)
1996
Executive Order 12958, Classified National Security Information, requires automatic declassification of non-exempt historical files over 25 years old. The Department of Defense (DoD) Historical Records Declassification Advisory Panel (HRDAP) is established under the Federal Advisory Committee Act as a subcommittee to the Historical Advisory Panel. The HRDAP charter is to recommend information and topic areas that would be valuable to historians and the public. DoD will consider those recommendations for immediate declassification. The HRDAP is chaired by Dr. Alfred Goldberg, OSD Historian; Ms. Rene Davis-Harding, Deputy Director, Security Program Integration, serves as Executive Secretary. Six civilian historians and historians from the military services and JCS comprise the panel. The Panel will meet four times per year. The transcripts for the February 23, 1996 meeting were prepared by a contract transcription service.
American Bar Association symposium on FOIA 25th anniversary
Government Information Quarterly, 1992
Act ("FOIA') (5 U.S.C. 5 552) celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday in 1991. Passed after more than a decade of lobbying and debate in Congress and signed into law (as P.L. 89-487) by President Lyndon Johnson on July 4, 1966, over the objection of every Federal agency, the Act has permanently changed the relationship between the Federal government and the public. On its face, the FOIA is a simple and straightforward statute. Its essence is the presumption that government information is public information, implemented by the judicially enforceable requirement that all Federal agency records be made available promptly to any person upon request, subject only to nine exemptions. Congress and the courts have declared that these exemptions must be "narrowly construed." Proponents of the FOIA see its guarantee of access to government information as an essential component of our democratic form of govemment. Both before the statute's enactment and more recently, its supporters have often invoked the words of James Madison to explain the central role of this statute in our democratic society: A popular Government, without popular i~ormation, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.'
The Struggle for Memory in Latin America, 2015
The article aims to explore, on a short/medium-term, the role of the US Department of State, and private research centres like the National Security Archive, in the Guatemala, Mexico, Chile and Argentina declassification projects (1994-2010). It will be focused on a) the genesis of the projects b) the official rhetoric used in the press releases c) the interaction between governmental and civil society actors on an international level. As it is widely known, the ‘critical mass’ of documents provided for these countries has helped to break new grounds not only for contemporary history and the politics of memory, but also for judiciary actions.
Understanding the 9/11 Commission archive: control, access, and the politics of manipulation
Archival Science, 2011
This article examines a range of issues surrounding the archive developed by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known and the ''9/11 Commission.'' We provide a partial biography of the 9/11 Commission's archival record as it was being assembled. This contemporaneous analysis of the politics surrounding this archive during its formative stage lends insights into the political and power dynamics shaping this archive. We review how the public record and public knowledge of 9/11 were shaped by the processes surrounding the accretion of this archive by charting records access and control controversies before, during, and years after the Commission submitted its final report. Despite claims from all sides that what was needed was an unfiltered, non-partisan and accurate review of what went wrong and how it went wrong, the story we outline underscores that the composition, accumulation, access to, and control of the archival record surrounding 9/11 was shaped as much by political concerns over blame and responsibility (and evading it) as it was by good faith efforts to get to the heart of the matter. In the charged atmospherics of modern US politics, custodial power over the record and access to it was used to prevent political embarrassment and to submerge-as opposed to surface-basic facts. Those with powers over access were not willing to risk having the documentary record either accessed or analyzed in a truly independent manner. This does not bode well, and in fact represents a deeper structural reality that will confound similar future governmental investigations that require access from those it is
Communication Law and Policy
When the United States adopted its Freedom of Information Act in 1966, it was the third country in the world to put in place such a groundbreaking democratic mechanism for ensuring public access to the information held by government. As such, it was, by definition, a global leader in this area. Fifty years later, however, according to the internationally recognized tool for assessing legal frameworks for what has come to be known as the right to information, or RTI, the RTI Rating, the United States FOIA languishes in the fifty-first position globally. This article describes the way the RTI Rating works and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the FOIA according to the rating. In some cases, these weaknesses appear to be derived, at least in part, from the age of the FOIA, and a correlation can be found between the performance of the United States law and other older laws. In other cases, further study is needed to identify the causes of the weaknesses.