New from the University Press of Kansas:
Secrecy in the Sunshine Era: The Promise and Failure of U.S. Open Government Laws (August 2014), by
Jason Ross Arnold (Virginia Commonwealth University). The Press explains:
A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation
unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable “sunshine era.”
Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting tools,
officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from overclassification
to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this dark side of the
sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in the first comprehensive,
comparative history of presidential resistance to the new legal regime,
from Reagan-Bush to the first term of Obama-Biden.
After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary
secret, Arnold considers the causes of excessive secrecy, and why we
observe variation across administrations. While some administrations
deserve the scorn of critics for exceptional secrecy, the book shows
excessive secrecy was a persistent problem well before 9/11, during
Democratic and Republican administrations alike. Regardless of party,
administrations have consistently worked to weaken the system’s legal
foundations.
The book reveals episode after episode of evasive
maneuvers, rule bending, clever rhetorical gambits, and downright
defiance; an army of secrecy workers in a dizzying array of institutions
labels all manner of documents “top secret,” while other government
workers and agencies manage to suppress information with a “sensitive
but unclassified” designation. For example, the health effects of Agent
Orange and antibiotic-resistant bacteria leaking out of Midwestern hog
farms are considered too “sensitive” for public consumption. These
examples and many more document how vast the secrecy system has grown
during the sunshine era.
Rife with stories of vital scientific evidence withheld,
justice eluded, legalities circumvented, and the public interest
flouted, Secrecy in the Sunshine Era reveals how our information society has been kept in the dark in too many ways and for too long.
More information is available
here.
