Wilson Quarterly revamps article on WikiLeaks
Wilson Quarterly has done a very nice redesign of my 2011 article, “The WikiLeaks Illusion.” Read the article.
Posts from the ‘Open government’ Category
Aug 21
ABA panel on national security surveillance after Snowden
I participated on a panel on “national security surveillance after Snowden” at the ABA annual meeting in Boston on June 8. The panel was organized by the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security. Learn more about the panel. Here is an ABA write-up of the session. I drew mainly on the background notes for my talks on transparency in New Zealand and Australia in May.
Why it’s time to rethink the problem of secrecy
These notes were prepared for forthcoming talks at the Australia-New Zealand School of Government in Wellington on May 16 and Melbourne on May 21; at the University of Tasmania Law School on May 23; and at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore on May 27.
We all recognize that excessive secrecy is a threat to democracy. But technological changes of recent years have fundamentally changed the nature of the “secrecy problem.” Today, we need a new way of thinking about secrecy that recognizes the advent of systems of public surveillance and control that span the public and private sector; that are supported by durable alliances of politicians, bureaucrats and politicians; and whose design and operation are practically unintelligible to most citizens. Read more
WikiLeaks article has most-read status for two years
WikiLeaks: The Illusion of Transparency, originally published in March 2012, has now completed two years on the “most-read articles” list for International Review of Administrative Sciences. Read the article.
An FOIA request, answered ten years later
Back around the turn of the millennium, I was doing a lot of writing on freedom of information laws and other topics relating to governmental openness. 
About 2001, I learned that NATO was overhauling its fifty-year-old policy on the handling of information shared among NATO member countries. The work was being handled by a body called the Ad Hoc Working Group for the Fundamental Review of NATO Security Policy (AHWG-FRNSP). Read more
Talks in Delhi, Medinipur December 11 and 14
I’ll be giving a talk on the right to information at the Centre for Policy Research’s Accountability Initiative in Delhi on Tuesday December 11. Details here. I’ll also be giving a lecture in the Department of Anthropology at Vidyasagar University in Medinpur on December 14. Details here.
Read a December 16 story in Kolkata’s Statesman about my lecture at Vidyasagar University.
New Zealand’s Dominion Post publishes oped on transparency
New Zealand’s Dominion Post has just published my oped, “Transparency is vital in these times.” The oped is based on my address to the Tenth World Conference of the International Ombudsman Institute in Wellington NZ last week. Read the article.
Talk at Conference of International Ombudsman Institute
I spoke on the opening panel of the Tenth World Conference of the International Ombudsman Institute in Wellington, New Zealand on November 14, 2012. The topic was Transparency in Troubled Times. Read a media release about the talk. Photo: fellow panelist Helen Clark, UNDP administrator, and Dame Beverley Wakem, Chief Ombudsman of New Zealand and IOI President.
Paper on reform of Canada’s Access to Information Act
The Office of Canada’s Information Commissioner has just posted a paper I wrote for them about reform of Canada’s Access to Information Act. Read the paper.
New book includes chapter on government secrecy
The Secrets of Law, a volume produced by the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought at Dartmouth College, is now available on Amazon. It includes my chapter on secrecy during the War on Terror, “Open Secrets and Dirty Hands.” The manuscript version of the chapter can be downloaded from SSRN.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
