ABSTRACT
David Vincent and Christopher Moran argued that the institutional limits on transparency ‘represented not the cause of secrecy in Britain, but a manifestation’. They attributed governmental secrecy to the political culture but did not offer a detailed study of British views on democracy. This chapter focuses on another way of increasing transparency: whistle-blowing. This goes even further than freedom of information legislation. Whistle-blowers provide forced access to information, without the approval of their superiors. The public debate about whistle-blowing civil servants sheds light on the balance of power in democracies. It shows how ministers, representatives, civil servants, and citizens struggled for the ‘right to know’, in order to exert political influence. Whistle-blowers not only provoked public debates about the issues they uncovered, but also about the legitimacy of their unauthorized disclosures. The chapter focuses on the period around 1966, when the United States introduced its Freedom of Information Act.
