Product Description: Private companies exert considerable control over the flow of information on the internet. Whether users are finding information with a search engine, communicating on a social networking site or accessing the internet through an ISP, access to participation can be blocked, channelled, edited or personalised...read more

Product Description: The UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making, and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters - known ubiquitously as the Aarhus Convention - is having an ever increasing influence on domestic and EU environmental law and procedure...read more

Product Description: Domestic constitutions and courts applying international human rights conventions acknowledge the significance of the mass media for a democratic society, not only by granting special privileges but also by imposing enhanced duties and responsibilities to journalists and media companies...read more

Product Description: Transparency has become a global concept of responsible government. This book argues that the transnational discourse of transparency promotes potentially contradictory policy ideas that can lead to unintended consequences. It critically examines whether or not increased transparency really leads to increased democratic accountability...read more

Many countries have laws about freedom of information, which is a citizen's right to access information from the government. A relatively recent development historically, today many people believe that freedom of information is a basic right of citizenship. Supporters of freedom of information say it provides one of the essential checks and balances on government, making government open, accountable, and reducing corruption. However, most countries' laws contain limits on disclosure, and there are many debates about where the lines should be drawn. Readers get explanations of how freedom of information laws work and how they have been framed in different countries. Chapters explore the debate about how these laws should be applied so that they work well for both government officials and the public.

Product Description: Conceptualizing access to government information as a human right is a new development in the global trend promoting institutional transparency. Bishop provides a comprehensive examination of international human rights law and explains four conceptualizations of access to information as a human right...read more

Product Description: Digital communications technology has immeasurably enhanced our capacity to store, retrieve, and exchange information. But who controls our access to information, and who decides what others have a right to know about us? In Controlling Knowledge, author Lorna Stefanick offers a thought-provoking and eminently user-friendly overview of current legislation governing freedom of information and the protection of privacy...read more

Product Description: Should all academic writings be free for us by anyone on the Web? The Virtues of Openness examines the complex history of the concept of the open society before beginning a systematic investigation of openness in relation to the book, the "open text" and the written word...read more

Product Description: The United States government is diligent—some might say to the point of obsession—in defending its borders against invaders. Now we are told a small, international band of renegades armed with nothing more than laptops presents the greatest threat to the U...read more

Product Description: A team of journalists with unparalleled inside access provides the first full, in-depth account of WikiLeaks, its founder Julian Assange, and the ethical, legal, and political controversies it has both uncovered and provoked. The extraordinary twists and turns of WikiLeaks have been closely followed by the Guardian newspaper ever since the website launched in 2006, and Guardian journalists have had unprecedented access to all the major players, from angry and embarrassed politicians and diplomats to the extraordinary figure of Julian Assange himself...read more

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination. Award-winning "Guardian" journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding have been at the centre of a unique publishing drama that involved the release of some 250,000 secret diplomatic cables and classified files from the Afghan and Iraq wars. At one point the platinum-haired hacker was hiding from the CIA in David Leigh's London house. Now, together with the paper's investigative reporting team, Leigh and Harding reveal the startling inside story of the man and the leak.

Product Description: Knowledge democracy is an emerging concept that addresses the relationships between knowledge production and dissemination, as well as the functions of the media and democratic institutions. Although democracy has been the most successful concept of governance for societies for the last two centuries, representative democracy, which became the hallmark of advanced nation-states, seems to be in decline...read more

Product Description: Leaders in the emerging field of information ethics discuss five topics: freedom of information and the pursuit of knowledge; information, technology and education; information, rights and social justice; ethics and the Internet; and professional ethics...read more

Product Description: The Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression (F.A.I.F.E.) initiative took the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (I.F.L.A.) outside its traditional focus on the status and techniques of the profession and postulated a new role for the Federation...read more

Product Description: Argues that increasing levels of transparency do not always change international politics for the better.While the trend toward greater transparency will bring many benefits, Kristin M. Lord argues that predictions that it will lead inevitably to peace, understanding, and democracy are wrong...read more

Product Description: Transparency in Global Change examines the quest for information exchange in an increasingly international, open society.  Recent transformations in governments and cultures have brought about a surge in the pursuit of knowledge in areas of law, trade, professions, investment, education, and medical practice—among others...read more

Product Description: ABOUT THE BOOK Freedom of Information in a Post 9-11 World is, to date, the first international scholarly examination of the impact of the terrorist attack on the United States in terms of how it may alter academic and corporate research, as well as the sharing of information generated by that research, by international colleagues in technological fields...read more

Product Description: We are all 'glass consumers'. Organisations know so much about us, they can almost see through us. Governments and businesses collect and process our personal information on a massive scale. Everything we do, and everywhere we go, leaves a trail...read more

Argues that the media serves the needs of those in power rather than performing a watchdog role, and looks at specific cases and issues