Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Table of statutes
- Table of cases
- Introduction
- 1 Persistent themes and novel problems
- 2 Information and national security
- 3 Government and information: a historical development
- 4 The Freedom of Information Act 2000
- 5 The exemptions
- 6 Decisions and Appeals on FOI Exemptions
- 7 Access to environmental information
- 8 Privacy, access and data protection
- 9 Claims and counterclaims
- 10 Secrecy and access in the European Union
- 11 Openness, information and the courts
- 12 Freedom of information: overseas experience
- 13 Conclusion
- Index
- References
1 - Persistent themes and novel problems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Table of statutes
- Table of cases
- Introduction
- 1 Persistent themes and novel problems
- 2 Information and national security
- 3 Government and information: a historical development
- 4 The Freedom of Information Act 2000
- 5 The exemptions
- 6 Decisions and Appeals on FOI Exemptions
- 7 Access to environmental information
- 8 Privacy, access and data protection
- 9 Claims and counterclaims
- 10 Secrecy and access in the European Union
- 11 Openness, information and the courts
- 12 Freedom of information: overseas experience
- 13 Conclusion
- Index
- References
Summary
The popular phrase ‘Information Society’ was coined to describe the essence of the computerised world. From globalised financial markets to government, from national and international security to education, from multinational corporations to small employers, from police to social welfare, medical treatment and social services, we are confronted by information repositories and retrieval systems whose capacity to store and transmit information is staggering. A moment's thought should make us appreciate that we have always been an information society. Anyone who has studied the constitutional history of Britain will appreciate that a major factor in the struggle between Crown and Parliament was the latter's desire to be informed about who counselled and advised the monarch in the formulation of policy. That monumental work in the history of our public administration, the Domesday Book, was basically an information exercise to assess the wealth and stock of the nation. Our process of criminal trial by law constitutes an attempt to exclude unreliable evidence and to establish by rules of evidence a more reliably informed basis of fact on which to establish guilt or innocence. Lawmaking itself ‘confessedly needs to be based on an informed judgment’ requiring ‘the widest access to information’. The spread of information in the form of fact, opinion or ideas has variously been repressed, exhorted, victimised or applauded to advance the ideologies of those whose moment of power is in the ascendant. In this general sense, we can see previous societies as information societies.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Freedom of InformationThe Law, the Practice and the Ideal, pp. 8 - 32Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010