Toby_Mendel

Tough one but actually a lot of work has been done on this issue. Have a look at the Tshwanee Principles (http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/publications/global-principles-national-security-and-freedom-information-tshwane-principles) which elaborate this issue in great detail. Obviously when a real national security interest is engaged, it trumps the right to know. But there are a number of subtleties to this. First, international law recognises a public interest override, whereby even if a national security interest is engaged, if the overall public interest would be served by disclosure, that should dominate (so the NSA revelations would be an example of that). Second, government's often claim national security interests even when there are none, so claims need to be carefully scrutinised.

Just a quick gloss on this; even in the US where there are soft deadlines, requesters are supposed to be given notice of how long the request will take, and that should then be respected. I'm assuming you were not notified of a 9 year deadline!! Perhaps your request has been lost!

I think the biggest risk for us is being thrown out of a country, rather than being arrested. We do human rights work which sometimes governments don't like (so they could throw us out) but it would just be a hassle for them to arrest us (would engage diplomatic issues, etc.). I have, however, been in a few countries where there are security risks (e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq).

Re. your second question, we are based in Canada. I think there are now enough local (i.e. US-based groups) engaged on the NSA issue that hopefully something will move. However, it is a very difficult one because this is an issue where the civil rights groups are a very long way away from government and the security people in terms of what they thing should be done.

On the third, the idea of "safety of the American people" is far too vague ego justify withholding information and it also has a strong paternalistic flavour to it. But, as I said in an earlier post, it is legitimate to withhold certain information for national security purposes.

Hard to say on your last question and I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'government' secrets (e.g. hiding corruption?) For me, secrets are legitimate only where they protect private interests (privacy, for example) or public interests (like national security) but not government interests (the government does not have interests other than those of the people). Otherwise, lots of governments have lots of secrets, both legitimate and illegitimate.

Unfortunately, lots of them. Not just the obvious cases (North Korea, Iran) but also lots of others, including some that might surprise you. Some relatively democratic countries - like Kenya, Ghana and even Costa Rica - do not even have FOIA laws. And some countries even with very good laws - like Ethiopia, 12th position on the RTI Rating from among 100 countries with laws - have done nothing to implement them. Even established democracies - like Canada - are a long way from being as open as they should be. Basically, this is an issue which needs a lot of work in almost every country.

All of the national laws are available on the RTI Rating website (see above). The best of them (as Michael says, Serbia, India and Slovenia) are also sort of Gold standards. You might also want to look at the indicators that we use for the RTI Rating (http://www.rti-rating.org/Indicatorsfinal.pdf) which basically describe the qualities that a good law should have.