Call For Papers on “Federal Secrecy After September 11 and the Future of the Information Society”

This sounds interesting — and important.

I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society seeks research papers for a special Fall/Winter, 2005 issue on the theme, “Federal Secrecy After September 11 and the Future of the Information Society.” This issue will be published with the support of The Century Foundation, which has received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to promote scholarly inquiry into the impacts of government secrecy. We are open to topics within any discipline, and would be especially receptive to multidisciplinary research in this domain.

Examples of possible topics include:

• The impacts of secrecy in various domains (e.g., transportation, facility vulnerabilities) on national security
• The impact of secrecy on public safety preparedness
• Historical patterns in government secrecy
• The impacts of the 2001 amendments to the FOIA
• Government secrecy behavior after September 11 compared to other wars
• U.S. government secrecy behavior in comparison with other democracies
• Secrecy before and after the end of the Cold War
• Is current secrecy policy a consequence of September 11 or an extension of Aministration policies antedating September 11?
• The impact of government secrecy and scientific research
• The impact of government secrecy and the impact on innovation
• The impacts of secrecy on public attitudes
• The interplay of federal secrecy policy with state and local open government policies

Proposals should offer original work that has not and will not be previously published in another venue. The work should not simply offer the author’s opinion, but shed significant light on the topic presented through the rigorous presentation and analysis of evidence. We envision that completed articles should be roughly 10,000 words each, exclusive of references (but including textual footnotes). Depending on the number of meritorious proposals received and accepted, honoraria in the range of $750.00-$1000.00 will be offered for completed works.

I/S would also be pleased to receive proposals for shorter, less formal essays, of no more than 5,000 words that represent advocacy or more preliminary analysis, although we will be unable to provide honoraria for such works.

Please forward proposals, no more than 1-3 pages in length, to Sol Bermann, Managing Editor of I/S, at bermann.1@osu.edu. The deadline for proposals is WEDNESDAY JUNE 1, 2005. Decisions will be made by June 15, 2005, and the deadline for accepted manuscripts will be August 1, 2005.

I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society is a new interdisciplinary journal of research and commentary concentrating on the intersection of law, policy, and information technology. I/S represents a one-of-a-kind partnership between one of America's leading law schools, the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, and the nation's foremost public policy school focused on information technology, Carnegie Mellon University's H. J. Heinz III School of Law and Public Policy. For additional information about I/S, see www.is-journal.org.

I'm on the I/S editorial board, and will probably submit a paper proposal if I can get the #$# grading done in time, but I'm not an editor of this symposium so I can't take the credit.