A Little Knowledge: Privacy, Security, and Public Information after September 11 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870784870 ISBN 13: 9780870784873

Publisher: Twentieth Century Fund

Synopsis

With the growth of the World Wide Web and the signing of the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments in the mid-1990s, technology promised empowerment and freedom. The web held the potential to create an informed and engaged citizenry by providing the American voter access to a virtually unlimited world of data.

After the September 11 attacks, however, the accessibility of computer networks has come to be viewed as a vulnerability instead of an asset. The freedom offered by technology has increasingly been replaced with secrecy in the name of security. But this equation of secrecy with security threatens not only our liberty but our safety, as an ill-informed public has little faith in its leadership and is poorly equipped to evaluate its vulnerabilities.

A Little Knowledge describes how the current administration’s campaign for unprecedented secrecy has affected the functioning of our democracy and recommends six critical tenets for framing a new, more open national policy on technology and public information. The book argues that citizens must assert the value of openness in formulating new and more productive approaches toward reconciling the imperatives of security and freedom.

Contributors include George T. Duncan, Baruch Fischhoff, and Victor W.Weedn (Carnegie Mellon University), Alice P. Gast (MIT), Sally Katzen (University of Michigan Law School), Richard C. Leone (The Century Foundation), John Podesta (Center for American Progress), Joel R. Reidenberg (Fordham Law School), and Peter M. Shane (Ohio State University/Carnegie Mellon).

About this title

About the Author

Richard C. Leone is president of The Century Foundation and coeditor of The War on Our Freedoms: Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism (Public Affairs, 2003).

Peter M. Shane is the Joseph S. Platt–Porter, Wright, Morris, and Arthur Professor of Law at the Ohio State University and founding director of the Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society at the H. J. Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University.

John Podesta is president and CEO of the Center for American Progress and served as chief of staff to President Clinton.

Edition details

• Publisher: Twentieth Century Fund
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870784870
• ISBN 13: 9780870784873
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 159
• Editor: Podesta John, Shane Peter M., Leone Richard C.