Ethical Concerns of Information Policy and Organization in National Security

Information organization is influenced by ideology; whether it is a personal belief system, organizational practice, or national ideology. The role of classification is dichotomous. In library and information science the goal is to be explicit while its role in national security is muchmore opaque. This article attempts to disambiguate this distinction in order to better understand the ethical implications of the classification process through examples from three cases related specifically to national security: (1) a dictionary for use by the East German Ministry for State Security, (2) the rules and regulations for the House Committee on un-American Activities, and (3) current requests by the government “to report suspicious activity.”