But the real explosion of global demands for transparency came in the 1990s. At that time, the end of the Cold War eliminated one significant rationale for extreme secrecy. The spread of democratic norms, the increasing strength of civil society organizations, and the rise of increasingly independent media have intensified pressures on governments to release information to their citizens.

At the same time, global economic integration led international investors to demand disclosures on corporate and national accounts in emerging economies, especially in the wake of the Asian crisis of 1997, which many blamed on the excessive secrecy of Asian corporations and governments. International financial institutions began demanding economic data from governments and posting those data on websites. The inter-governmental organizations themselves faced intense pressure from activists around the world to open up their analyses and processes of decision making to public scrutiny and input.

The Impact of Technology

All these demands were, and are, facilitated by information technology, which has made information ever easier to locate and to share. It is almost impossible to overstate the dramatic impact of this now-familiar phenomenon. For a personal example, get on the website of any of the commercial companies now operating imaging satellites. Anyone can buy a reasonably detailed picture, good enough to show a car in the driveway, taken from 400 miles above. The new plethora of eyes in the sky are beginning to reveal a great deal of information previously unavailable to the public. Despite the claims of movie-makers, these satellites cannot show individuals, but they can show the shadows of individuals clearly enough to make it possible to count the size of groups. And they can definitely reveal a wealth of data good enough to enable observers to distinguish between tanks and trucks, see the path of destruction in the wake of a tornado, determine how far floodwaters or fires have extended, or detect likely sites of mass graves. Such sources of information are making it ever easier for anyone able to pay to weigh in with informed commentary on public debates on everything from arms control to the status of the environment to humanitarian emergencies.

The new data collection technologies represent only one of the revolutionary information technologies that matter for decision making. They are sources of data, raw facts that lack meaning without context. The data have to be turned into useful information—facts placed within a context. This is where the extraordinarily fast evolution of computers comes into play. Geographic information systems, for example, can now insert data from satellite imagery into databases. Analysts with a US environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) spent three years using satellite imagery and a wealth of other data to determine how many nuclear warheads the United States actually needs to cover likely military targets. That exercise publicly duplicated much of what the US Strategic Commands had done secretly for decades in its operational planning—putting the NRDC, and anyone else using the data, in a position to challenge military assessments.

But what really gives the information revolution the potential to be more than a set of mere technical advances is the ease and power of communication. This has been an escalating evolution, from telegraph to telephone to television to fax machines to, most recently, the Internet. Even very poor countries have at least some degree of Internet access now, and entrepreneurs are coming up with new ways to connect people all the time. In India, for example, trucks with transmitters drive from one village to the next, allowing villagers in the remotest places a few hours of connectivity at a time. In Bangladesh and other countries, local entrepreneurs, backed by micro-credit agencies, are providing cell phone services in both urban and rural areas. Although the digital divide between rich and poor remains real, and troubling, those who lack the latest gadgets will are nonetheless gaining a degree of connectivity unimaginable to anyone just a few decades ago.

The Information Debate Today

Despite the continued escalation of information-technology capabilities, the pro-transparency trends of the 1990s have hit some serious speed bumps since the turn of the millennium. These have come about in large part because of the dramatic change in policy emanating from the United States. Under the administration of US President George W. Bush, the United States has veered sharply toward the secrecy end of the transparency-secrecy continuum, a change that preceded but was intensified by the terrorist attacks of September, 11, 2001. Fear that people will use information “the wrong way” has led to a sharp crack-down on what had been increasingly open flows of information. Through both its power of example and increasingly its insistence on negotiating secrecy agreements with other nations involved in the campaign against terror, the United States is spreading the new dogma of opacity broadly around the world.

The most important debate of the moment deals with how transparency and access to government-held information relates to national security. The Bush administration has enacted a sweeping series of policies aimed at clamping down on the free flow of information. Most, though not all, have been rationalized in terms of protecting national security.

Shortly after the attacks, US Attorney General John Ashcroft put forward new standards for agencies that were being sued under the Freedom of Information Act. Previous policy had said that any agency denying a Freedom of Information Act claim would have to justify that denial by showing that demonstrable harm would result from the release of the requested information. If it could not show such harm, the US Justice Department would not represent it in court. Under the Ashcroft policy, agencies merely need to find a sound legal basis for denial, whether or not there is any reason to believe harm would result from disclosure. The policy change in fact had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It had been in process before, and merely represents a reversion to the policies of earlier Republican administration.

Since September 11, US Pentagon officials have repeatedly warned employees and contractors against contacts with the press and against sharing “sensitive but unclassified information.” A wide array of federal agencies, from the Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency, has been granted new authority to classify information, and many government agencies have removed previously accessible information from their web sites. The Homeland Security Act, passed in 2002, includes a number of provisions blocking citizen access to information. Most notably, the legislation exempts from public disclosure information that private firms submit to the US Department of Homeland Security about potential terrorist targets. The measure is meant to encourage firms to share information that might be useful in defending against terrorism but which, if disclosed, would likely lead to litigation or damage to the company’s reputation. There are few safeguards to protect against misuse of the legislation by companies more interested in protecting themselves against charges of serious wrong-doing than in protecting the country from terrorists.