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Interesting article from the Federal Access to Information Commissioner on the the Manley Report

While it may be explicable, if not laudable, for any government to want to withhold bad news, it is difficult to understand why even good news is not being released. Surely the fact that Canada decided not to turn over any more detainees to the local authorities in Afghanistan, thereby removing the risk of them being tortured, was good news. If even good news is not disseminated, you cannot blame Canadians for wondering how much bad news might be lurking in government records, waiting to be uncovered. It is true that the government should not reveal any information that could bring harm to those who serve in Afghanistan. But if the government’s position is that everything to do with detainees, and much of what pertains to Afghanistan, is a security matter and is secret by definition, then the Access to Information Act recognizes the importance of protecting certain information and contains exemptions that can be used. The role of my office is to ensure that those exemptions are being applied appropriately.

Love this quote criticizing the “old folks’” condescension toward the “young folks”: “You didn’t behave like that because nobody gave you the option.”

Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. “You didn’t behave like that because nobody gave you the option.”