The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

Access the full article here.

Other Writing:

Interview

Interview with Sophie Roell on “The Best Books on the Politics of Information”

“Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose for democracy? How do we even start thinking about these questions? Political scientist Henry Farrell proposes key books for building a curriculum on ‘the politics of information,’ starting with a ...
Read Article
Essay

Promoting Norms for Cyberspace

The United States defined its preferred cyberspace norms—Internet openness, security, liberty, free speech, and with minimal government oversight and surveillance—in its 2011 International Strategy for Cyberspace. Although the United States has had little success so far in establishing norms against commercial espionage in cyberspace, it has had some early gains with the recognition that international ...
Read Article