The interests of government, corporations, and citizens are simultaneously orbiting each other and producing an information eclipse. This eclipse threatens to diminish two very important information rights we should all be enjoying:
- Access to information
- Personal privacy
These “twin” rights of access and privacy are, at the same time, eclipsing each other in spite of a tradition of a politically active citizenry.
Two hundred years ago, the only bureaucracy capable of amassing enough power to infringe upon individual rights was the federal government. America’s founding fathers foresaw the dangers of a large, centralized bureaucracy overstepping its bounds and infringing the rights of citizens and intentionally built specific limits and restrictions into the founding documents.
Of course, that was two hundred years ago. Could our founding father’s have foreseen multi-national corporate entities, often operating beyond the scope of single governments? Corporations have managed, somehow, to wrest the same rights—and in some cases even more rights—as those vested in the citizenry. Today, the majority of our laws are written largely to support and advance corporate interests.
Corporations first existed in the public interest, at the pleasure of the citizenry, and enjoyed no rights granted a citizen. They could be easily and swiftly dissolved when they were no longer useful. Building infrastructures—roads, bridges, ports, utilities, etc.—is still a compelling reason for the rise and use of corporations.
Currently, we have four main undulating, sometimes colliding, and certainly eclipsing interests competing for citizen awareness and participation:
- Diminishment of individual information rights by government
- Diminishment of individual information rights by corporate interests
- Diminishment of individual access to information by government
- Diminishment of individual access to information by corporations Envision the two colliding information interests—information access and personal privacy—overlapped by the two eclipsing bodies—government and corporations—as a four-dimensional eclipse. What do we do when such eclipses occur? In natural systems there are two ingrained responses to a threat: fight or flight. We can choose to either run away from the threat or stand our collective ground and fight. The appropriate response depends upon the specifics of the situation, of course. Before we can make our fight or flight choice, though, we must clearly identify the threat. That’s the purpose of this book; to serve as a sort of early-warning virtual canary in an informational coal mine. The need for citizen participation increases along with the recognition and realization that power does exist in limitations. The United States Constitution both recognizes and has depended upon a system of checks and balances for each of its three branches of government. Knowing that ultimately each branch will, from time to time, test its powers, our Constitution honored the power inherent in limits by its very design. No such system of checks and balances exists in the private sphere. Corporations have enjoyed a long run of virtually unchecked free reign in America. There are glimmers of hope that this corporate eclipse is beginning to wane in the form of public sentiment gradually turning against large corporate interests when they exist solely to provide wealth for their shareholders, without concern for their stakeholders.
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