How the fuck is it even remotely legal for a politician to sign an NDA with a corporation to hide information from their constituents?
How the fuck is it even remotely legal for a politician to sign an NDA with a corporation to hide information from their constituents?
It should not be legal for elected officials to sign NDAs
with corporations.Part of the price for being given the power of office should be the loss of privacy. If you are an official, you are no longer a private citizen. You are a representative and should not be doing anything you want to keep secret from your constituency.
I generally agree with that, but sometimes government officials have to perform official duties that require confidentiality.
If they’re intervening on behalf of a constituent and it involves medical or otherwise personal information, then they should be required to maintain confidentiality. Whether that requires an NDA or something else is a different question.
No NDA necessary. That’d be under other laws/systems. Some would be under things like HIPAA in the US if they learned the information in the course of their work. At minimum, it would fall under civil liability if they publicised private information of private individuals and those people claimed that it caused them harm in some way.
At this point I think you may not even understand what a NDA is.
Are you under the impression if someone doesn’t want to talk about a topic, they just “sign a NDA” and don’t have to talk about it?
An NDA is a contract in which someone agrees not to disclose information on a certain set of topics, under penalty defined in the contract or civil liabilities for breach of contract. “Have to talk about it” is an odd phrase for the subject. An NDA doesn’t force someone to talk/not talk about anything. It just creates a strong incentive to not talk about the topics included in the NDA or anything that might arguably fall under those topics because it opens one up to penalties. Many people can and do use NDAs as an excuse not to share information, with some even using a false implication that an NDA exists which prevents them sharing inconvenient information.
…
You…
You thought I meant an NDA was a magical spell that literally and physically prevents someone from speaking about something?
I have zero idea where you got the idea that a NDA can make someone talk about something tho, that’s even more random.
An NDA with the federal government means felonies and long sentences.
But yes, someone can physically violate an NDA, it’s not fucking magic.
Thanks for angrily strawmanning what I wrote. It tells me I can just drop this thread. Toodles.
If by “sometimes” you mean “they’ll make you sign a NDA to tell you 8 hours before everyone else it’s Taco Tuesday”…
Yeah, that’s pretty close
NDAs aren’t rare at all, and I wish it was surprising no one on Lemmy seems to have actual governmental experience.
Hey jackass, I had to sign an NDA when I left my government job because I held a security clearance. I know more about it than you do.
Trite quips about taco tuesday aside, government jobs require confidentiality about some things, and transparency about others. There’s no contradiction there, but ideally it should be unambiguous where the boundary is. Those things should be clearly defined.
A good start, albeit still overly simplistic, would be to say confidentiality concerning information belonging to their constituents, and transparency concerning information belonging to corporations and their donors. Unfortunately that still leaves a lot of vaguery and wiggle-room.
But I’m no policy-maker, so even if I were to write a twenty-page document defining everything in minute detail, it still wouldn’t matter.
Except for personal stuff. But any action that will impact anyone outside of their family should be public.
Nope. All of it. It should be unappetizing to take power over others. If someone wants to have authority to afflict thousands if not millions of people with their existence, they don’t get to have any space to hide their crimes. If they don’t want to make that sacrifice to keep us safe, they can just stay home. No one is forcing them to seek public office.
I’d argue that medical records and maybe travel info should also be open. Though travel info should be on a delay of say 2 months.
I’d argue relevant medical records. I don’t need to know if an elected official has diabetes or is on PrEP, but I do need to know if they’re off their mental health medication, if they’re experiencing dementia, or if they’re dead/dying.
Personally, I’d be very against medical records. Some folks have diseases and disorders which are grossly misunderstood by the public at large, and even civil servants deserve to return to a normal life after they leave office.