Legal
New York Department of Environmental Conservation (NYDEC). Information from DEC with links to other legal issues.
See: Landman Report Card
- 'Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.'
- -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
- 'Secrecy is the badge of fraud'
- -- Sir John Chadwick (b. 1941), British judge
- 'Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.'
- -- Lord Acton (1834-1902), English historian
- 'The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.'
- --Adlai Stevenson (1900-1965), American statesman
- 'Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.'
- --John Milton (1608-74), English poet
BAN is the world's only organization focused on confronting the global environmental injustice and economic inefficiency of toxic trade (toxic wastes, products and technologies) and its devastating impacts.
Working at the nexus of human rights and environment, we confront the issues of environmental justice at a macro level, preventing disproportionate and unsustainable dumping of the world's toxic waste and pollution on our global village's poorest residents.
At the same time we actively promote the sustainable and just solutions to our consumption and waste crises -- banning waste trade, while promoting green, toxic free and democratic design of consumer products.
BAN is a 501(c)3 charitable organization of the United States, based in Seattle, Washington
BAN leaked the Summers Memo in 1991 that Summers signed while he was Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Hydraulic Fracturing involves dumping millions of gallons of toxic slaine brine whose ingredients remain a trade secret due to monitoring exemptions granted by the 2005 Energy Policy Act.
See: Jennifer Clapp. (2010). Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries. Cornell Univ Press. 2010.
See: Gas Drillers Plead Guilty to Felony Dumping Violations
See: Tragedy of the Commons | Mixplex
See: Barlow, Maude. Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. The New Press, 2009.
The Government Accountability Project’s mission is to promote corporate and government accountability by protecting whistleblowers, advancing occupational free speech, and empowering citizen activists...
...Founded in 1977, GAP is the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization. Located in Washington, D.C., GAP is a nonpartisan, public interest group. In addition to focusing on whistleblower support in our stated program areas, we lead campaigns to enact whistleblower protection laws both domestically and internationally. GAP also conducts an accredited legal clinic for law students, and offers an internship program year-round.
See: Halliburton's Interests Assisted by White House - Los Angeles Times.
See: Daniel Ellsberg's The Pentagon Papers | Wikipedia | The Most Dangerous Man in America (film)
See: Michael Mann. The Insider (1999). Based on a story about Jeffrey Wigand adapted from Marie Brenner, May 1996, Vanity Fair, “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.
See: Goldman Environmental Prize Winners (2001) Jane Akre and Steve Wilson.
See: Alfed and John Donovan. 2010-10-27. "Sadistic sacking of a Royal Dutch Shell whistleblower". Royal Dutch Shell PLC.com
See: Rick Piltz. Climate Science Watch.
See: Julian Assange. Wikileaks.
See: Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy (1997) | Wikipedia
See: Massimo Calabresi. Dec. 2, 2010. Time. "WikiLeaks' War on Secrecy: Truth's Consequences."
More damaging, perhaps, is that a fundamental mistrust of government is a natural outgrowth of secrecy inflation. As the number of secrets expanded in the 1990s, Moynihan observed in his 1997 report, the imperative to keep them secret diminished.
Because "almost everything was declared secret, not everything remained secret and there were no sanctions for disclosure," Moynihan wrote. And the more secrets leak, the worse it is for government credibility: either they are important and the sanctions are too minimal, or they are unimportant and the public believes there's no point in keeping secrets at all.
"When trusted insiders no longer have faith in the judgment of government regarding secrets, then they start to substitute their own judgment," says William J. Bosanko, head of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives, which oversees what gets classified. "And that's a big problem." (See TIME's video "WikiLeaks Founder on History's Top Leaks.")
See also:
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick. Secrecy: the American experience. Yale University Press, 1999.
