Category: Quotations

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Quotations

2014.7.21

The argument for human rights is based upon protection for individuals against one-sided, deceitful, inefficient, oppressive, arbitrary, cowardly, and bullying government. They are the rights that are necessary for our individual integrity, for our acceptance by the state and civil society as full members of that community, of our right to belong … We are not treated as full members when government does not provide us with information about the effect of [its] decisions, the outcomes of such decisions, or the use of resources that made the exercise of power possible.

Patrick Birkinshaw, “Freedom of Information and Openness: Fundament Human Rights?” Administrative Law Review 58(1), 2006.
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Quotations

2014.7.21

Actually taking part in deliberation on priority-setting issues might lead to increased acceptance and trust, but simply being informed that other citizens had that opportunity to do so did not seem to have any effect. Taken together, this implies that people in general might not care that much about the procedure when judging the decision in the case of priority setting in health care. The turn from a focus on principles to a focus on procedures when it comes to priority setting strategies can thus be even more problematic to implement than previous research has suggested.

Jenny de Fine Licht, “Do We Really Want to Know? The Potentially Negative Effect of Transparency in Decision Making on Perceived Legitimacy,” Scandinavian Political Studies 34(3), 2011.
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Quotations

2014.7.15

… our own attempts to obtain policies governing assertion of state secrets privilege met with failure, inasmuch as there appear to be no policy guidelines on the use of the privilege in any major department or agency of the executive branch. Freedom of Information Act requests to some three dozen agencies and their various subcomponents yielded nothing in the way of documentation of guidance for use of the privilege. And limitations on assertion of the privilege appear to be self-imposed by the individual agencies, and use of the privilege seems to be carried out ad hoc at the discretion of department heads and their assistants. Perhaps the general feeling of administrators concerning the privilege was summed up in a Department of the Navy memorandum: it concluded that “there is nothing but good news about the state secrets privilege” as a tool to prevent disclosure of information.

William G. Weaver and Robert M. Pallitto, “State Secrets and Executive Power,” Political Science Quarterly 120 (1).
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Quotations

2014.7.14

…the New Zealand FOI regime probably fares the best, given its progressive openness and high level of political and official support, sustained by a wider pluralistic culture. The UK follows New Zealand, with reasonably high rates of disclosure, a strong Information Commissioner, single use of the veto, and some explicit political support. Third is Ireland and fourth Australia, both of which, despite high levels of use and disclosure, suffer from a high level of appeals, a lack of political support and consequent restrictive reform. Canada comes last as it has continually suffered from a combination of low use, low political support and a weak Information Commissioner since its inception.

Robert Hazell and Ben Worthy, “Assessing the performance of freedom of information”
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Links Quotations

2014.7.14

The tax increase comes as airlines face increased volatility in jet-fuel prices because of the crisis in Iraq, and as they continue to adjust to the decline in the value of the Canadian dollar, which has also hit airlines because the price of fuel is measured in U.S. dollars.

Greg Keenan, “Airlines to fight ‘unbelievably punitive’ Ontario fuel tax”

Setting aside whether it’s even a good idea to raise this particular tax – I have some doubts – if you replaced ‘decline’ with ‘increase’ in the quotation it would mirror previous complaints from airlines about raising taxes in the 90s through to today.

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Quotations

2014.7.12

At a more domestic level, UK communications providers are worried that they could be exposed to legal action because of the unlawful mass surveillance that they were party to – even though on the whole they wanted no part of it.

Well, more precisely, many comms providers wanted no part of it unless the government picked up all the costs (older readers familiar with US law may recall the CALEA legislation that forced communications companies to make their technology wiretap friendly – with much the same response from companies).

There is a view that if the liability for unlawful surveillance rested entirely with the government, there would be no appetite for this legislation. Britain long ago elevated its institutional vandalism of EU legal rights from a science to an art, and then to a sport.

Simon Davies, “ Britain takes the Uganda Road to legalise and extend state surveillance”
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Quotations

2014.7.11

The importance of access to information is clearer when the right to freedom of expression is considered more narrowly. Suppose that our concern is with expression on a specific subject: for example, about government’s effectiveness in executing a policy. In some cases, government agencies may be informational monopolists: that is, they may have exclusive control over critical information required for intelligence discussion of the policy. If no right of access is recognized, the right to free expression is hollowed out. Citizens will have the right to say what they think, but what they think will not count for much, precisely because it is known to be grossly uninformed. A more sensible approach would be to treat government monopolists just as we treat private media monopolists, by curbing their monopoly power so that we may promote free expression.

Alasdair Roberts, “Structural Pluralism and the Right to Know”
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Quotations

2014.7.10

Arguments about the right to information should be resolved by reference to its role in protecting the fundamental interests of citizens, and not by reference to the history or structural characteristics of the institution holding the contested information.

Alasdair Roberts, “Structural Pluralism and the Right to Know”
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Quotations

2014.7.9

Transparency certainly destroys secrecy: but it may not limit the deception and deliberate misinformation that undermine relations of trust. If we want to restore trust we need to reduce deception and lies rather than secrecy. Some sorts of secrecy indeed support deception, others do not. Transparency and openness may not be the unconditional goods that they are fashionably supposed to be. By the same token, secrecy and lack of transparency may not be the enemies of trust.

Onora O’Neill, “Trust and Transparency”, the BBC Reith Lectures.
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Quotations

2014.7.2

[Mark Carney’s] prescription: End through strict regulation and resilience tests the scandal of too-big-to-fail, where “bankers made enormous sums” and “taxpayers picked up the tab for their failures.” Recreate fair and effective markets with real transparency and make every effort — through codes of conduct and even regulatory obligations — to instill a new integrity among traders (even if social capital cannot be contractual). Curtail compensation offering large bonuses for short-term returns; end the overvaluing of the present and the discounting of the future; ensure that “where problems of performance or risk management are pervasive,” bonuses are adjusted “for whole groups of employees.”

Above all, understand that, “The answers start from recognizing that financial capitalism is not an end in itself, but a means to promote investment, innovation, growth and prosperity. Banking is fundamentally about intermediation — connecting borrowers and savers in the real economy. In the run-up to the crisis, banking became about banks not businesses; transactions not relations; counterparties not clients.”

In other words, human beings matter. An age that has seen emergence from poverty on a massive scale in the developing world has been accompanied by the spread of a new poverty (of life and of expectations) in much of the developed world. Global convergence has occurred alongside internal divergence. Interdependence is a reality, but the way it works is skewed. Clinton noted that ants, bees, termites and humans have all survived through an unusual shared characteristic: They are cooperative forms of life. But it is precisely the loss at all levels of community, of social capital, that most threatens the world’s stability and future prosperity.

Roger Cohen, “Capitalism Eating Its Children”