University of Florida Levin College of Law UF Law Scholarship Repository Faculty Publications Faculty Scholarship 2-1-2014 The mplI ausibility of Secrecy Mark Fenster University of Florida Levin College of Law,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub Part of the Administrative Law Commons, National Security Commons, and the Politics Commons Recommended Citation Mark Fenster, The Implausibility of Secrecy, 65 Hastings L.J. 309 (2014), available at http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub/347 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at UF Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UF Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Fenster_21 (M. Stevens) (Do Not Delete) 1/29/2014 6:39 PM Articles The Implausibility of Secrecy Mark Fenster Government secrecy frequently fails. Despite the executive branch’s obsessive hoarding of certain kinds of documents and its constitutional authority to do so, recent high-profile events—among them the WikiLeaks episode, the Obama administration’s infamous leak prosecutions, and the widespread disclosure by high-level officials of flattering confidential information to sympathetic reporters—undercut the image of a state that can classify and control its information. The effort to control government information requires human, bureaucratic, technological, and textual mechanisms that regularly founder or collapse in an administrative state, sometimes immediately and sometimes after an interval. Leaks, mistakes, and open sources all constitute paths out of the government’s informational clutches.