The Atlanta Document: Is Privacy a Human Right?

Any secular discussion of "human rights" contains a bit of doublespeak: the language of politics, diplomacy, and force is couched in the ephemeral platitudes of universality. This does not mean the goals of the Atlanta Document are not laudable. A world in which governments, non-profits, and corporations embraced the letter and intent of the document's suggestions would indeed see more "efficient markets, commercial investment, competition for government business, fair administration and compliance of laws and regulations."

Of course, institutions have manifold reasons for retaining secrecy, and an equally large number of tricks to preserve it. The Atlanta Document provides these institutions with a gaping escape hatch. It does not require complete transparency. There is a provision that "all exemptions should be subject to a public interest override, which mandates release of otherwise exempt documents when the public benefit of release outweighs the potential public harm." Implicit is the concession that some secrecy is needed for states and corporations to perform their functions. I find this concession incontrovertible and necessary, but once secrecy is legitimized, it can fester and multiply without detection. There is an impossibility in reducing the quantity of secrecy analogous to subtracting from infinity. The Atlanta Document's methods of coping with this chasm are woefully inadequate to the lopsided power of the institutions with the knowledge of the secrets. After all, it's the concealing party who decides when "the public benefit of release outweighs the potential public harm." And isn't there something a little Kafkaesque about freedom of information act requests: How do you request information you don't know about, and if you can receive information from a FOIA request, why wasn't it available in the first place? (The official line is the prohibitive cost of making all information public, but the costs are going down and, anyway, cost is not the whole matter.)

The larger point is that a culture of transparency cannot be acquired by force. It is virtuous (or, at the worst, nugatory) to agitate for the goals of the Atlanta Document, but there is something that feels, to me, authoritarian and pernicious about elevating access to information to the pedestal of fundamental human rights. Whatever power the concept of human rights holds, it is in its go-for-broke empowering affect, in the anointing of an ideal with the gravity that requires-or at least shames-people to spend blood and treasure on its realization. This power should be unleashed very, very carefully. The last decade has shown the monstrous ramifications of applying the label "human right" to the ideal of freedom.