“Aftergood is too close to the center of power,” said Julian Assange. “He is not an independent fighter for freedom of information.”
The passing criticism of me (I’m also “jealous”) was the first thing that caught my eye in the new book “Staatsfeind WikiLeaks” by Der Spiegel reporters Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark. But the book itself is quite a bit more interesting and perceptive than that.
The authors, who are neither fans nor opponents of WikiLeaks, go out of their way to gather new information about the origins and development of the project. They seek out contrasting perspectives and bring them to bear in interesting and challenging ways. Of course, the story is unfinished.
“WikiLeaks is an organization in transition, with a dialectical relation to the mass media. WikiLeaks has changed journalism, but journalism has also changed WikiLeaks,” they write.
See the Spiegel website on “Staatsfeind WikiLeaks” here. An English-language excerpt, published last month, is here.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.