Book Review: The transparency fix: Secrets, leaks, and uncontrollable government information

• Author: Tessa Cole
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567720904409
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Chapter 6: “Antipolitics in the Banlieues of Lyon” presents the movement of the antipolitics in

the working class of Lyon specifically with regard to the Salafi groups’ communities. This chapter

examines the social impact of Salafi groups, and how they are abandoning the society due to

discrimination and legislative laws that cause so many to find themselves incapable of practicing

their citizenship. Women were highly affected by the antiveiling legislations, which created obsta-

cles in the areas of education and employment. Chapter 7 presents a conclusion and summarizes the

study findings related to democracy, feminism, and the war on terror.

The book ends with two appendices, Appendix A: Between the “Logic of Logic” and the “Logic

of God” and Appendix B: Interviews.

ORCID iD

Ahmad Falah Alomosh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5452-8586

Fenster, M. (2017).

The transparency fix: Secrets, leaks, and uncontrollable government information. Stanford University Press. 286 pp.

$26.00, ISBN 978-1-5036-0266-3.

Reviewed by: Tessa Cole, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567720904409

Governmental transparency, a metaphor commonly used to refer to a government’s willingness to

disclose sensitive information to the public, has become a vital characteristic used to describe and

measure the effectiveness of democracy. In The Transparency Fix: Secrets, Leaks, and Uncontrol-

lable Government Information, Mark Fenster theoretically applies a communication perspective to

examine the misperceptions, failures, and public dissatisfaction with institutional transparency

within a democracy. The author fulfills this examination with a provisional overview of the admin-

istrative, legal, cultural, and social aspects of democratic governments. Fenster forms a clear

hypothesis by expanding on the experiences of prominent bureaucratic officials and the failures

that arise from hiding both republican and democratic governmental documents and actions by

exploring the administrative, judicial, and legislative practices that have shaped democracy in the

United States. The author’s primary purpose is to emphasize the need for transparency in democracy

by examining government secrecy and information control, which influence the invisibility of

bureaucrat processes. He achieves this through the use of historical examples of how governmental

information has been disseminated legally and illegally.

Fenster’s monograph is comprised of eight chapters that cover topics such as democratic gov-

ernments in Post-War, the innovations of transparency laws, the disclosure effects of the innovative

laws, and the implausibility of information control. Specifically, Part I is comprised of three chapters

outlining the liberation free and open government in the Post-War era, the inadequacies related to the

innovations of transparency, and the limits of governmental transparency related to secrete states.

Part II thoroughly examines uncontrollable states and the disclosure effects of government infor-

mation. Here, the author emphasizes the governments’ inability to control and hide all sensitive

departmental information in this section, which is imperative to understanding the dissatisfaction

among the government with information leaks and the public desire for governmental accountabil-

ity. Part III of the book concludes with two chapters that analyze the likelihood of transparency and

failures of the informational fixes, along with the dissatisfaction of information breaches.

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