David Cole: The Three Leakers and What to Do About Them - Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy by Rahul Sagar Princeton University Press, 281 pp. - Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles by James C. Goodale CUNY Journalism Press, 260 pp.

Were Snowden’s leaks justified? Rahul Sagar’s Secrets and Leaks sheds important light on the question. In carefully argued and lucid prose, Sagar, a professor of politics at Princeton, argues that secrets are inevitable, as are leaks—and that leaks have an important if precarious part in checking secrecy abuse. The power to declare information secret, like many other authorities, is both essential and susceptible to misuse. In theory, formal legal checks on executive power to determine what should and should not be secret would be preferable to leaving abuse-checking to leakers who take it upon themselves to break the law. But, Sagar contends, the two principal alternative candidates for implementing formal oversight—the courts and Congress—are each unlikely to perform the function effectively.


Mein Blog befasst sich in einem umfassenden Sinn mit dem Verhältnis von Wissen, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Ein besonderes Augenmerk richte ich dabei auf die Aktivitäten des Medien- und Dienstleistungskonzern Bertelsmann und der Bertelsmann Stiftung.