UK Information Commissioner Says Wikileaks Means Governments Should Be More Open
from the well,-duh dept
This is a bit of a surprise. As many are claiming that the end result of Wikileaks will be that governments try to be even more secretive, the UK's information commissioner, Christopher Graham, is apparently urging governments to take a different lesson, and that it shows they should be a lot more open in the first place:"We are strongly of the view that things should be published. Where you're open things will not be WikiLeaked. Whatever view you take about WikiLeaks -- right or wrong -- it means that things will now get out. It has changed things. I'm saying government and authorities need to factor it in. Be more proactive, [by] publishing more stuff, because quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn't know it. You can't un-invent WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is part of the phenomenon of the online, empowered citizen ... these are facts that aren't going to go away. Government and authorities need to wise up to that."He also suggests that becoming more secretive would be a mistake. Specifically, he calls it nonsense:
"One response is that they will clam up and not write anything down, which is nonsense, you can't run any organisation that way. The other is to be even more open. The best form of defence is transparency -- much more proactive publication of what organisations do. It's an attitude of 'OK. You want to know? Here it is'."It would be nice if anyone listened to him, though I'm not convinced anyone in power actually will...
Filed Under: christopher graham, openness, transparency, uk, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks
