期刊名称：Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review
印刷版ISSN：1528-8625
出版年度：2011
卷号：18
期号：1
页码：61-116
出版社：University of Michigan Law School
摘要：The content of administered public school exams, modifications made by a government to its voting machines, and the business strategies of government corporations should be of interest to the public. At a minimum, they are the kinds of information that a government should allow its citizens to see and examine. After all, the public might have some legitimate questions for its government: Is that public school examination fair and accurate? Is that voting machine working so that my vote gets counted? To whom or what is that government agency marketing and are kickbacks involved? One would think that the government should have to publicly answer such questions, at least in a democracy. While initially the above does not sound too controversial, state law has made it problematic. Getting access to the information that would answer the above questions may not be easy because the person requesting the information may have to show that the information is not a government trade secret before it can be disclosed. Today, the government of the people can keep information from the people by way of the commercial, intellectual property law of trade secrecy. Strangely, the people--citizens of states and the United States--apparently have trade secrets that they themselves cannot see. In other words, there is information that the government itself creates on its own (a "government trade secret") and that courts and attorneys general have found meet the applicable definition of a trade secret. This Article examines whether a government trade secret should be allowed to exist and, if so, whether governments should be allowed to shield government trade secrets from public disclosure. Importantly, I am not focusing here on trade secrets shared with government by private industry or created by private industry on the public's dime. That topic was the focus of an earlier article, Secrecy and Unaccountability: Trade Secrets in Our Public Infrastructure ("Secrecy"). In Secrecy, I examined the question of whether private entities engaged in the provision of public infrastructure, like voting machines and public Wi-Fi Internet access, should be allowed to shield information regarding their products and services from public disclosure by way of trade secrecy. This is a question of applying democratic values like transparency and accountability to private entities, the practical effect of which is in direct conflict with the purpose of trade secrecy, namely, keeping commercial information private. I concluded that, as applied to public infrastructure, trade
关键词：Public interest; Information; Secrecy; Access to information; Trade secrets; Democracy; Transparency; Public policy; Freedom of information; Accountability
