I’ve been catching up on Radio Berkman, the podcast produced by our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a great companion to the TLF’s own Tech Policy Weekly Podcast.  There’s been a lot of talk about government transparency on the TLF lately, including TPW 40: Obama, e-Government & Transparency.  But that conversation has been mainly focused on how to make “public” records accessible.

The most recent Radio Berkman episode, “Can you Keep a Secret?” explores the thorny questions about what should be deemed public in the first place, and what should be classified:

The government keeps secrets. We take that for granted. But should we? Some speculate that intelligence agencies and elected officials are a little bit trigger happy with the “Top Secret” stamp, and that society would benefit from greater openness. With the government classifying millions of pages of documents per year – in a recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress – a great deal of useful human knowledge gets put under lock and key. But some argue that secrecy is still crucial to our national security. Radio Berkman pokes its head into a recent talkback with the directors of the film  Secrecy, Harvard University professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss. They are joined by Harvard Law School professors Jonathan Zittrain, Martha Minow, and Jack Goldsmith.

I look forward to seeing the film (when it comes out on Netflix).  

What I found most interesting was the discussion of the essential trade-off in the relationship between the media and the state has always been between the media’s “independence” and its “responsibility” (~33:30 in).  Even the staunchest critics of the national security state would probably accept that there are some stories in the media shouldn’t publish because they’d jeopardize the safety of Americans.  But we all want the media to blow the whistle on the bad stuff that goes on behind a veil of secrecy.  Drawing that line is a terribly difficult task.  But it becomes even more complicated with the decline of traditional professional investigative journalism and the rise of blog/amateur journalism.   Continue reading →

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