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The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World resources

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damental moral claims. One relates to democracy. As democratic norms become entrenched more widely around the world, it is be- coming apparent that a broad right of access to information is fun- damental to the functioning of a democratic society. The essence of representative democracy is informed consent, which requires that information about government practices and policies be disclosed. And in democracies, by definition, information about government belongs to the people, not the government. A human rights argument combines pragmatic and moral claims, seeing access to information as both a fundamental human right and a necessary concomitant of the realization of all other rights. Those of course include the political and civil rights with which freedom of information has long been associated. As Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes clear, the freedom to speak on public issues is meaningless without the freedom to be informed. Be- yond this, advocates increasingly argue that information access is the right that makes possible the achievement of social and economic jus- tice, “one that levers and supports the realization of rights to proper welfare support, clean environment, adequate housing, health care, or education,” in the words of one recent book.2 Yet citizens seeking information—and governments wanting to open up—find themselves up against powerful forces: entrenched habits, protection of privilege, and fear of how newly released infor- mation might be used, or misused. Arguments against disclosure abound everywhere disclosure is sought. Sometimes those arguments are sound. No reasonable person would demand that a government release information about troop movements in time of war, or require that corporations give away trade secrets essential to their business, or insist that individual citi- zens sacrifice their basic right to privacy. But the boundaries of what constitutes legitimate secrecy are rarely obvious. No country wants its adversaries to have access to details about the design and potential weaknesses of its weapons— but soldiers whose lives may be threatened by those weaknesses would benefit greatly from having those weapons subjected to public scrutiny before they are needed. Proprietary business information may include data about potentially dangerous flaws in products sold to children, or about production processes that produce unaccept- able toxic emissions. Individual privacy claims need to be weighed introduction: the battle over transparency 

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