The dangers of growing secrecy in government, for instance new North Carolina legislation to keep death penalty chemical compounds confidential from the public, forms the focus of Elon Law Professor David Levine's latest blog post for Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).
“To the extent that we untether legal confidentiality from any clear theoretical grounding – privacy, property, commercial ethics, contract – it runs the risk of being a powerful catch-all, subject to abuse,” Levine writes in “The Chilling Effects of Confidentiality Creep” posted on CITP’s Freedom to Tinker blog platform.
Using the example of new North Carolina legislation, Levine summarizes that the proposed law at the desk of Governor Pat McCrory would result in “shutting down mandatory public access to basic information involved in extinguishing life in the name of justice.”
“[W]e often forget that doing the public’s business is not the same as private commerce, precisely because the customer is the public itself,” Levine writes. “We often wind up with confidentiality creep, expanding the definition of what we call ‘confidential’ for underexplored or non-explored reasons, with little or no public discussion. If you’re not convinced, throw the efforts to gain public access to the basic negotiating text for the nearing-completion multilateral Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement into the mix, because that’s confidentiality creep also. It’s not publicly available, for unclear reasons … Let’s try to stop the quiet, baseless, under-explained creep.”
Read Levine’s complete CITP blog post here.
More information about Elon Law Professor David Levine is available here.