Transparency And Accountability Quotes

When entrenched and opaque corruption continuously shrouds the lines between truth and fiction and blurs our perception, we must take control of a deceitful narrative that aims to manipulate our lives and maim transparency and accountability. (“Bribe payers' index“)

Grow with discipline. Balance intuition with rigor. Innovate around the core. Don't embrace the status quo. Find new ways to see. Never expect a silver bullet. Get your hands dirty. Listen with empathy and overcommunicate with transparency. Tell your story, refusing to let others define you. Use authentic experiences to inspire. Stick to your values, they are your foundation. Hold people accountable, but give them the tools to succeed. Make the tough choices; it's how you execute that counts. Be decisive in times of crisis. Be nimble. Find truth in trials and lessons in mistakes. Be responsible for what you see, hear, and do. Believe.

I believe that companies, as major employers, resource managers, technological innovators, and capital allocators, have a unique responsibility to operate with integrity, transparency, and accountability.

Telling the truth may cause a few seconds of pain, but there's no medicine that can manage the pain of keeping lies.

At its core, ethical governance is about doing the right thing, even when it's difficult or costly. It's about prioritizing values like honesty, fairness, transparency, and accountability in all business dealings.

It's very, very difficult I think for us to have a transparent debate about secret programs approved by a secret court issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law.

Honest accounting is a really important part of corporate responsibility. Let's just be honest and transparent with the numbers. No inflating, no exaggerating, no reconfiguring... Just pure numbers that tell the honest truth about the companies financial reality.

I arrive now at the ineffable core of my story. And here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

In 2013, there were over a hundred thousand private foundations in the United States with assets of over $800 billion. These peculiarly American organizations, run with little transparency or accountability to either voters or consumers yet publicly subsidized by tax breaks, have grown into 800-billion-pound Goliaths in the public policy realm.

Avoid the temptation to cut corners - accuracy and transparency are essential. Hiring an accountant may cost you money upfront, but could save you a lot of money in the long run.

This transparent system of accounting means that we know which geiko did the most business on any given day. It is always clear who is Number One.

Promote Transparency and Accountability

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency. Later, I’m going to challenge some of Dalio’s principles, but first I want to explain the weapons he has used to wage a war on groupthink.

Lead is one toxic legacy in America's cities. Another is segregation, secession, redlining, and rebranding: this is the art and craft of exclusion. We built it into the bones of our cities as surely as we laid lead pipes. The cure is inclusion. Flint's story is a clear call for committing anew to our democratic faith in the common wealth. As the water crisis demonstrates, it is simply not good enough for government officials to say, 'Trust us.' For all the inefficiencies and messiness that comes with democracy, the benefits - transparency, accountability, checks and balances, and the equitable participation of all people - are worth it.

Accountability and transparency, the two cardinal principles of good governance in a democratic setup, depend, for their observance, on how well the public audit function is discharged.

But then, even in the most significant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is the same for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it us these notions which we recognise and to which we listen.

Republicans, as well as Democrats committed to our constitutional framework, should fearlessly marshal the administration’s frauds, obstructions, and violations of law. They should demand transparency and accountability for the lies, the broken oaths, the betrayal of the rule of law, and the damage wrought—including lives not only devastated but lost due to the administration’s recklessness.

To My Priestess Sisters To my priestess sisters: the keepers of mysteries, the medicine women, the story keepers and story tellers, the holy magicians, the wild warriors, the original ones, the ones who carry the ancients within the marrow of your bones, the ones forged in the fires, the ones who have bathed in thier own blood, the heroines who wear thier scars as stars, the ones who give birth to their visions and dreams, the ones who weep and howl upon the holy altars, the avatars, the mothers, maidens and crones, the mystics, the oracles, the artists, the musicians, the virgins, the sensual and sexual, the women of our world- I honor you. I stand for you and with you. I celebrate both your autonomy and our sisterhood of One. We are many. We are fierce. We are tender. We are the change agents and we are radically holding and clearing space for the bursting forth of the holy seeds of the collective conscience and consciousness. We are manifestors and flames of purification and transformation. We are living our lives in authenticity, vulnerability, transparency and unapologetically. We are committed to integrity, impeccability, accountability, responsibility and passionate love. We are here on purpose, with purpose and give no energy to conformity, acceptance or approval. We are the daughters of the earth and the courageous of the cosmos. Priestess, keep living your life passionately, raising the cosmic vibrations and lowering your standards for no one. You are brazenly blessed and a force of nature. Nurture yourself and one another. You are a crystalline bridge between realms and uniting heaven and earth. You are a priestess and you are divinely anointed, appointed and unstoppable.

Companies should maintain accurate and timely financial records because it serves as the foundation for informed decision-making, ensures compliance with regulatory requirements, and enhances transparency, ultimately bolstering trust among stakeholders and facilitating long-term financial stability and growth. Without good records, businesses may risk financial mismanagement and uncertainty, hindering their ability to thrive in a competitive market.

Today, for India, development is not an option—it is a necessity. The lives and livelihoods of far too many people are at stake. Development cannot be sustainable unless it is premised on an edifice of transparency, accountability and ethical governance.

No rape victims should ever be shamed and silenced! This is critical for those investigating violations in Christian communities. The victims should always receive full support, not stigmatization, blaming, guilt-trips or pressure to ‘forgive and forget,’ because the perpetrator (who was caught) apologizes. There should be transparency and accountability. Any suggestion of suppressing a legal investigation to protect the institution only reinforces the notions of hypocrisy that exists from those outside the church.

Dan came around the pulpit. "If you're standing in a place today where you know you need more--healing, hope, a glimpse that there is a happy ending--it's time to become a rebel. To do something daring and wild and reach out for grace, even though it doesn't make sense. But I warn you, once you embrace Christ, you too become a rule breaker. Because a life committed to God requires us to live uncomfortably. Inconveniently. Accountably. Bravely. Transparently. Vulnerably. It requires us to love without rules. Welcome to Grace.

α = r × β where r is the rate of return on capital. For example, if β = 600% and r = 5%, then α = r × β = 30%.13 In other words, if national wealth represents the equivalent of six years of national income, and if the rate of return on capital is 5 percent per year, then capital’s share in national income is 30 percent. The formula α = r × β is a pure accounting identity. It can be applied to all societies in all periods of history, by definition. Though tautological, it should nevertheless be regarded as the first fundamental law of capitalism, because it expresses a simple, transparent relationship among the three most important concepts for analyzing the capitalist system: the capital/income ratio, the share of capital in income, and the rate of return on capital. The rate of return on capital is a central concept in

Without real accounting and financial transparency and sharing of information, there can be no economic democracy. Conversely, without a real right to intervene in corporate decision-making (including seats for workers on the company’s board of directors), transparency is of little use. Information must support democratic institutions; it is not an end in itself. If democracy is someday to regain control of capitalism, it must start by recognizing that the concrete institutions in which democracy and capitalism are embodied need to be reinvented again and again.59

If you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have [sic] been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear, so that nobody will bring accountability to them. It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

A sure mark of maturity is to be painstakingly accountable at those times when we have stepped so far afield that we can't even see the field anymore. A second mark is to push aside the suffocating waves of pain, the rancid rot of shame, and the crushing press of humiliation in order to intentionally correct our actions and step back into the field. And the third mark of maturity is ruthlessly crafting and forcefully applying all of the corrections necessary within ourselves (despite whatever cost that might incur or pain it might cause) so that we never step out of the field again and in doing so never step all over ourselves or anyone else.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing some one we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognise and to which we listen.

While focus has been on child exploitation and sexual abuse at a global, I cannot stop expressing the importance of having conversations within our very own families. Conversations of actions. Conversations of awareness. Conversations of safety. Conversations of protection. Conversations of transparency. Conversations of accountability. Conversations of consequences. Conversations of support. Kids grow into adults and are often left to tackIe the effects of trauma on their own. When someone comes out, stop asking them why they waited. Or, call them a liar. Or, say they are crazy. Or, treat them like they are the abuser. Or, keep them ostracized as the outcast. These familial defense mechanisms only continue to add to the trauma and abuse. We need to create a culture within our families where our children - and children turned adults - don't feel so voiceless and unprotected when confiding in their truth. It's never too late to have these difficult conversations. Please have them.

Âprecise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer. As such, its emphasis is on “word-for-word” correspondence, at the same time taking into account differences of grammar, syntax, and idiom between current literary English and the original languages. Thus it seeks to be transparent to the original text, letting

What unites conservatives and modernizers and young and old, is a hunger not for freedom but for justice; for genuine rule of law, not rule by royal whim. They want a government that is a transparent and accountable, one that provides standards services such as are available in far less wealthy societies: good education, job, affordable housing , and decent health care.

There is a vast difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. The difference is commitment. Motivation and discipline will not ultimately occur through listening to sermons, sitting in a class, participating in a fellowship group, attending a study group in the workplace or being a member of a small group, but rather in the context of highly accountable, relationally transparent, truth-centered, small discipleship units. There are twin prerequisites for following Christ - cost and commitment, neither of which can occur in the anonymity of the masses. Disciples cannot be mass produced. We cannot drop people into a program and see disciples emerge at the end of the production line. It takes time to make disciples. It takes individual personal attention. Discipleship training is not about information transfer, from head to head, but imitation, life to life. You can ultimately learn and develop only by doing. The effectiveness of one's ministry is to be measured by how well it flourishes after one's departure. Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip, and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to teach others as well. If there are no explicit, mutually agreed upon commitments, then the group leader is left without any basis to hold people accountable. Without a covenant, all leaders possess is their subjective understanding of what is entailed in the relationship. Every believer or inquirer must be given the opportunity to be invited into a relationship of intimate trust that provides the opportunity to explore and apply God's Word within a setting of relational motivation, and finally, make a sober commitment to a covenant of accountability. Reviewing the covenant is part of the initial invitation to the journey together. It is a sobering moment to examine whether one has the time, the energy and the commitment to do what is necessary to engage in a discipleship relationship. Invest in a relationship with two others for give or take a year. Then multiply. Each person invites two others for the next leg of the journey and does it all again. Same content, different relationships. The invitation to discipleship should be preceded by a period of prayerful discernment. It is vital to have a settled conviction that the Lord is drawing us to those to whom we are issuing this invitation. . If you are going to invest a year or more of your time with two others with the intent of multiplying, whom you invite is of paramount importance. You want to raise the question implicitly: Are you ready to consider serious change in any area of your life? From the outset you are raising the bar and calling a person to step up to it. Do not seek or allow an immediate response to the invitation to join a triad. You want the person to consider the time commitment in light of the larger configuration of life's responsibilities and to make the adjustments in schedule, if necessary, to make this relationship work. Intentionally growing people takes time. Do you want to measure your ministry by the number of sermons preached, worship services designed, homes visited, hospital calls made, counseling sessions held, or the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus? When we get to the shore's edge and know that there is a boat there waiting to take us to the other side to be with Jesus, all that will truly matter is the names of family, friends and others who are self initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus because we made it the priority of our lives to walk with them toward maturity in Christ. There is no better eternal investment or legacy to leave behind.

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).

If you’re going to build a strong culture, it’s paramount to make diversity one of your core values. This is what separates Bridgewater’s strong culture from a cult: The commitment is to promoting dissent. In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions. In a cult, core values are dogma. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to challenge the principles themselves. During training, when employees learn the principles, they’re constantly asked: Do you agree? “We have these standards that are stress tested over time, and you have to either operate by them or disagree with them and fight for better ones,” explains Zack Wieder, who works with Dalio on codifying the principles. Rather than deferring to the people with the greatest seniority or status, as was the case at Polaroid, decisions at Bridgewater are based on quality. The goal is to create an idea meritocracy, where the best ideas win. To get the best ideas on the table in the first place, you need radical transparency.

Thiel’s loathing for government spending did not apply when the government spent money on him. His next big startup, Palantir—a name borrowed from Tolkien—depended for survival upon the least transparent, least accountable, and most profligate extension of the federal government, the CIA. The agency invested in Thiel through its Silicon Valley VC front, In-Q-Tel. With Palantir, this self-described “civil libertarian” became an important player in the growth of a secretive, invasive, and patently unconstitutional global surveillance apparatus. Asked in a 2014 online chat if Palantir was “a front for the CIA,” Thiel replied, “No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.” With 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to the private sector, this dismissive wisecrack was not so much an outright denial as it was a sly wink at the extent of corporate dominance over even the most powerful federal agencies.

Automated decision-making shatters the social safety net, criminalizes the poor, intensifies discrimination, and compromises our deepest national values. It reframes shared social decisions about who we are and who we want to be as systems engineering problems. And while the most sweeping digital decision-making tools are tested in what could be called “low rights environments” where there are few expectations of political accountability and transparency, systems first designed for the poor will eventually be used on everyone.

If, on the way back from the Passage des Patriarches to my apartment near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I had thought of examining myself like a transparent foreign body, I should have discovered one of the laws which governs the behavior of "featherless bipeds unequipped to conceive the number pi"—Father Sogol's definition of the species to which he, you, and I belong. This law might be termed: inner resonance to influences nearest at hand. The guides on Mount Analogue, who explained it to me later, called it simply the chameleon law. Father Sogol had really convinced me, and while he was talking to me, I was prepared to follow him in his crazy expedition. But as I neared home, where I could again find all my old habits, I imagined my colleagues at the office, the writers I knew, and my best friends listening to an account of the conversation I had just had. I could imagine their sarcasm, their skepticism, and their pity. I began to suspect myself of naiveté and credulity, so much so that when I tried to tell my wife about meeting Father Sogol, I caught myself using expressions like "a funny old fellow," "an unfrocked monk," "a slightly daffy inventor," "a crazy idea.

More than any USDA rule or regulation, this transparency is their best assurance that the meat they're buying has been humanely and cleanly processed. "You can't regulate integrity," Joel is fond of saying; the only genuine accountability comes from a producer's relationship with his or her customers, and their freedom "to come out to the farm, poke around, sniff around. If after seeing how we do things they want to buy food from us, that should be none of the government's business." Like fresh air and sunshine, Joel believes transparency is a more powerful disinfectant than any regulation or technology.

Dotcom believes one of the reasons he was targeted was his support for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. He says he was compelled to reach out to the site after US soldier Bradley Manning leaked documents to it. The infamous video recording of the Apache gunship gunning down a group of Iraqis (some of whom, despite widespread belief to the contrary, were later revealed to have been armed), including two Reuters journalists, was the trigger. “Wow, this is really crazy,” Dotcom recalls thinking, watching the black-and-white footage and hearing the operators of the helicopter chat about firing on the group. He made a €20,000 donation to Wikileaks through Megaupload’s UK account. “That was one of the largest donations they got,” he says. According to Dotcom, the US, at the time, was monitoring Wikileaks and trying better to understand its support base. “My name must have popped right up.” The combination of a leaking culture and a website dedicated to producing leaked material would horrify the US government, he says. A willing leaker and a platform on which to do it was “their biggest enemy and their biggest fear . . . If you are in a corrupt government and you know how much fishy stuff is going on in the background, to you, that is the biggest threat — to have a site where people can anonymously submit documents.” Neil MacBride was appointed to the Wikileaks case, meaning Dotcom shares prosecutors with Assange. “I think the Wikileaks connection got me on the radar.” Dotcom believes the US was most scared of the threat of inspiration Wikileaks posed. He also believes it shows just how many secrets the US has hidden from the public and the rest of the world. “That’s why they are going after that so hard. Only a full transparent government will have no corruption and no back door deals or secret organisations or secret agreements. The US is the complete opposite of that. It is really difficult to get any information in the US, so whistleblowing is the one way you can get to information and provide information to the public.

As black-box technologies become more widespread, there have been no shortage of demands for increased transparency. In 2016 the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation included in its stipulations the "right to an explanation," declaring that citizens have a right to know the reason behind the automated decisions that involve them. While no similar measure exists in the United States, the tech industry has become more amenable to paying lip service to "transparency" and "explainability," if only to build consumer trust. Some companies claim they have developed methods that work in reverse to suss out data points that may have triggered the machine's decisions—though these explanations are at best intelligent guesses. (Sam Ritchie, a former software engineer at Stripe, prefers the term "narratives," since the explanations are not a step-by-step breakdown of the algorithm's decision-making process but a hypothesis about reasoning tactics it may have used.) In some cases the explanations come from an entirely different system trained to generate responses that are meant to account convincingly, in semantic terms, for decisions the original machine made, when in truth the two systems are entirely autonomous and unrelated. These misleading explanations end up merely contributing another layer of opacity. "The problem is now exacerbated," writes the critic Kathrin Passig, "because even the existence of a lack of explanation is concealed.

Change always starts at home. The only person you can actually change is yourself. No matter how functional or dysfunctional your organization, you can begin applying XP for yourself. Anyone on the team can begin changing his own behavior. Programmers can start writing tests first. Testers can automate their tests. Customers can write stories and set clear priorities. Executives can expect transparency. Dictating practices to a team destroys trust and creates resentment. Executives can encourage team responsibility and accountability. Whether the team produces these with XP, a better waterfall, or utter chaos is up to them. Using XP, teams can produce dramatic improvements in the areas of defects, estimation, and productivity.

I doubt it's a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply imbedded. Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet -- even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quite Jurassic Park) finds a way -- but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don't like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a "good" woman, or a "likable" woman, or simply a "woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman," can be.

Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way—her notion being that the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives, were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady.

[E]ven in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the records of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen.

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even in the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen.

The supposedly eyewitness authority of the Pseudo-Turpin finds a parallel in another genre in which vernacular prose was pioneered: that of the historical memoir. There were twelfth-century verse histories narrated by authors who had personally participated in the events they describe, such as the Third Crusade. But the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4 saw a switch to prose. This shameful fiasco, in which the crusaders were induced to turn aside from the Holy Land and attack instead the Christian city of Constantinople, inspired two contrasting accounts. Robert de Clari--ignorant of higher-level strategy, but all agog at the splendours of Constantinople--gives a worm's eye view. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, by contrast, has a top diplomat's suave authority and a leader's eye for the aesthetics of war--the splendid sight of a fleet, or the noble heroism of a ruler. For both authors the medium of prose seems to convey the purported authenticity and transparency of lived experience.

Goldman Sachs itself—and so Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them. Secondly, there was a crude, messy, slow, but acceptable substitute for Mike Burry’s credit default swaps: the actual cash bonds. According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield on the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn’t risk-free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman could lose everything. Today Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. “If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman’s books, they’d be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things,

Citizen participation will reach an all-time high as anyone with a mobile handset and access to the Internet will be able to play a part in promoting accountability and transparency. A shopkeeper in Addis Ababa and a precocious teenager in San Salvador will be able to disseminate information about bribes and corruption, report election irregularities and generally hold their governments to account. Video cameras installed in police cars will help keep the police honest, if the camera phones carried by citizens don’t already. In fact, technology will empower people to police the police in a plethora of creative ways never before possible, including through real-time monitoring systems allowing citizens to publicly rate every police officer in their hometown. Commerce, education, health care and the justice system will all become more efficient, transparent and inclusive as major institutions opt in to the digital age. People who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity or anything else will

The Proofs Human society has devised a system of proofs or tests that people must pass before they can participate in many aspects of commercial exchange and social interaction. Until they can prove that they are who they say they are, and until that identity is tied to a record of on-time payments, property ownership, and other forms of trustworthy behavior, they are often excluded—from getting bank accounts, from accessing credit, from being able to vote, from anything other than prepaid telephone or electricity. It’s why one of the biggest opportunities for this technology to address the problem of global financial inclusion is that it might help people come up with these proofs. In a nutshell, the goal can be defined as proving who I am, what I do, and what I own. Companies and institutions habitually ask questions—about identity, about reputation, and about assets—before engaging with someone as an employee or business partner. A business that’s unable to develop a reliable picture of a person’s identity, reputation, and assets faces uncertainty. Would you hire or loan money to a person about whom you knew nothing? It is riskier to deal with such people, which in turn means they must pay marked-up prices to access all sorts of financial services. They pay higher rates on a loan or are forced by a pawnshop to accept a steep discount on their pawned belongings in return for credit. Unable to get bank accounts or credit cards, they cash checks at a steep discount from the face value, pay high fees on money orders, and pay cash for everything while the rest of us enjoy twenty-five days interest free on our credit cards. It’s expensive to be poor, which means it’s a self-perpetuating state of being. Sometimes the service providers’ caution is dictated by regulation or compliance rules more than the unwillingness of the banker or trader to enter a deal—in the United States and other developed countries, banks are required to hold more capital against loans deemed to be of poor quality, for example. But many other times the driving factor is just fear of the unknown. Either way, anything that adds transparency to the multi-faceted picture of people’s lives should help institutions lower the cost of financing and insuring them.

It seems that in the kingdom of Heaven, the cosmic lottery works in reverse; in the kingdom of Heaven, all of our notions of the lucky and the unlucky, the blessed and the cursed, the haves and the have-nots, are turned upside down. In the kingdom of Heaven, the last will be first and the first will be last. In India, I realised that while the poor and oppressed certainly deserve my compassion and help, they do not need my pity. Widows and orphans and lepers and untouchables enjoy special access to the Gospel that I do not have. They benefit immediately from the Good News that freedom is found not in retribution but in forgiveness, that real power belongs not to the strong but to the merciful, that joy comes not from wealth but from generosity. The rest of us have to get used to the idea that we cannot purchase love or fight for peace or find happiness in high positions. Those of us who have never suffered are at a disadvantage because Jesus invites His followers to fellowship in His suffering. In fact, the first thing Jesus did in His sermon on the mount was to mess with our assumptions about the cosmic lottery. In Luke’s account, Jesus says, "Blessed are you who are poor for yours is the Kingdom of God. Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.” (Luke 6:20-21; 24-25) It seems that the kingdom of God is made up of the least of these. To be present among them is to encounter what the Celtic saints called “thin spaces”, places or moments in time in which the veil separating heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material, becomes almost transparent. I’d like to think that I’m a part of this kingdom, even though my stuff and my comforts sometimes thicken the veil. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – these are God things, and they are available to all, regardless of status or standing. Everything else is just extra, and extra can be a distraction. Extra lulls us into the complacency and tricks us into believing that we need more than we need. Extra makes it harder to distinguish between God things and just things.

There’s one more thing that happens as I listen to life stories. I realize I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories. Very few of us sit down one day and write out the story of our lives and then go out and recite it when somebody asks. For most of us it’s only when somebody asks us to tell a story about ourselves that we have to step back and organize the events and turn them into a coherent narrative. When you ask somebody to tell part of their story, you’re giving them an occasion to take that step back. You’re giving them an opportunity to construct an account of themselves and maybe see themselves in a new way. None of us can have an identity unless it is affirmed and acknowledged by others. So as you are telling me your story, you’re seeing the ways I affirm you and the ways I do not. You’re sensing the parts of the story that work and those that do not. If you feed me empty slogans about yourself, I withdraw. But if you stand more transparently before me, showing both your warts and your gifts, you feel my respectful and friendly gaze upon you, and that brings forth growth. In every life there is a pattern, a story line running through it all. We find that story when somebody gives an opportunity to tell it.

Police officers today are a protected class, one no politician wants to oppose. Law enforcement interests may occasionally come up short on budgetary issues, but legislatures rarely if ever pass new laws to hold police more accountable, to restrict their powers, or to make them more transparent. In short, police today embody all of the threats the Founders feared were posed by standing armies, plus a few additional ones they couldn’t have anticipated. This isn’t to say we’re in a police state, a term that’s often misused. Generally speaking, we’re free to travel. We don’t face mass censorship. We still have habeus corpus. And the odds of any single person being victimized by a wrong-door raid, shot or beaten by a cop, or otherwise victimized by militarized police violence are slim to nil. But perhaps we have entered a police state writ small. At the individual level, a police officer’s power and authority over the people he interacts with day to day is near complete. Absent video, if the officer’s account an incident differs from that of a citizen— even several citizens— his superiors, the courts, and prosecutors will nearly always defer to the officer. If other officers are nearby, there are policies in place—official and unofficial—to encourage them to back one another up. Even if the officer does violate the citizen’s rights, the officer is protected by qualified immunity.

He was tired of gossip. God, was he tired of gossip. By the time he sold it, SpeakEasyMedia had fully morphed into the very thing Leo most loathed. It had become a pathetic parody of itself, not any more admirable or honest or transparent than the many publications and people they ruthlessly ridiculed—twenty-two to thirty-four times a day to be exact, that was the number the accountants had come up with, how many daily posts they needed on each of their fourteen sites to generate enough clickthroughs to keep the advertisers happy. An absurd amount, a number that meant they had to give prominence to the mundane, shine a spotlight of mockery on the unlucky and often undeserving—publishing stories that were immediately forgotten except by the poor sods who’d been fed to the ever-hungry machine that was SpeakEasyMedia. “The cockroaches of the Internet,” one national magazine had dubbed them, illustrating the article with a cartoon drawing of Leo as King Roach. He was tired of being King Roach. The numbers the larger media company dangled seemed huge to Leo who was also, at that particular moment, besotted with his new publicist, Victoria Gross, who had come from money and was accustomed to money and looked around the room of Leo’s tiny apartment the first time she visited as if she’d just stepped into a homeless shelter. (“When you said you lived near Gramercy,” she said, confused, “I thought you’d

It must be noted that Congress also has another power that it has rarely used—impeachment. Many people are under the mistaken impression that impeachment can only be used to remove the president or vice president. But the impeachment power given to Congress in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution provides Congress the authority to remove “all civil Officers of the United States” for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That means, for example, that Congress has the ability to use impeachment to remove individuals who refuse to provide Congress with the information it needs for oversight, or who, like John Koskinen, President Obama’s head of the IRS, withheld information from Congress concerning the destruction of records that had been subpoenaed for the Lois Lerner investigation. As James Madison said, impeachment was a necessary power to defend the nation against “the incapacity, negligence or perfidy” of officials within the government. Of course, if an administration were truly transparent, none of this would matter. Truth fears no inquiry. Crafty, corrupt politicians realize that transparency and accountably go hand in hand. If the Obama administration truly had nothing to hide, it would not have gone to such extraordinary lengths to keep information on what it was doing and its internal machinations from the public. What is needed is a commitment to transparency that cuts across partisan, political lines.

John Adams was keenly aware of the relationship between secrecy and corruption in government and the preservation of liberty. Many of the Founding Fathers understood the importance of transparency in a nation’s rulers. James Madison wrote that “A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.” Thomas Jefferson said that “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.” Judicial Watch has always believed that knowing the “characters and conduct” of the individuals who serve in the government and ensuring that the public is “informed” about what its government is doing is crucial to preserving our great republic. That is why for over twenty-two years we have been the most active user of the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to promote transparency, accountability, and integrity in government, politics, and the law. We are the nation’s largest and most effective government watchdog group that works to advance the public interest. Transparency is all about self-governance. If we don’t know what the government is doing, how is that self-governance? How is that even a republic? When we were founded in 1994, we used the FOIA open records law to root out corruption in the Clinton administration. During the Bush administration, we used it to combat that administration’s penchant for improper secrecy. But the Bush administration pales in comparison to the Obama administration. Today, our government is bigger than ever, and also the most secretive in recent memory.

As it happens, the term “white skin privilege” was first popularized in the 1970s by the SDS radicals of “Weatherman,” who were carrying on a terrorist war against “Amerikkka,” a spelling designed to stigmatize the United States as a nation of Klansmen. Led by presidential friends, Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather terrorists called on other whites to renounce their privilege and join a global race war already in progress. Although their methods and style kept the Weather radicals on the political fringe, their views on race reflected those held by the broad ranks of the political left. In the following years, the concept of “white skin privilege” continued to spread until it became an article of faith among all progressives, a concept that accounted for everything that was racially wrong in America beginning with its constitutional founding. As Pax Christi USA, a Catholic organization, explained: “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because white male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.” This is the theme of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, the most popular book ever written on the subject, and of university curricula across the nation. Eventually, the concept of white skin privilege was embraced even by liberals who had initially resisted it as slander against a nation that had just concluded a historically unprecedented civil rights revolution. This was because the concept of white skin privilege provided an explanation for the fact that the recent Civil Rights Acts had not led to an equality of results, and that racial disparities persisted even as overt racists and institutional barriers were vanishing from public life. The inconvenient triumph of American tolerance presented an existential problem for civil rights activists, whom it threatened to put out of work. “White skin privilege” offered a solution. As the Southern Poverty Law Center explained: “white skin privilege is not something that white people necessarily do, create or enjoy on purpose,” but is rather an unavoidable consequence of the “transparent preference for whiteness that saturates our society.” In other words, even if white Americans were no longer racists, they were.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Deists, not religious authoritarians, codified the clear separation of church from state in addition to the division of powers within the state. Deists, not the Continental philosophers, established our democratic republic upon uniquely radical interpretations of constitutional and procedural stability, representation, accountability, and transparency. Deists, not autocrats, formed a more perfect Union that preserved equally for each individual the universal civil liberties inscribed in the Bill of Rights. It was Deists who stood up for Everyman by instituting true equality and freedom for all.

Just as the financial crisis was incubated when unaccountable bank executives created a culture of rewarding short-term profits without wanting to know the ugly details about their mortgage-backed securities, so too does medicine’s lack of accountability create an institutional culture that fosters overtreating and runaway costs.

I remember when the internet was supposed to bring about a transparent society. The reverse has happened. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1076). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.

At a time when our world is more complicated than ever, is changing faster than ever, and is more radically transparent than ever, we desperately need our leaders to be stronger than ever. And they're not. They're failing us. They are unaccountable and untrustworthy.

What is it in the Nehru-Gandhi family that compels them to anoint only immediate family members as alter egos or heirs apparent? Obviously, their secrets regarding their political and financial misdeeds are such that there is no substitute for immediate family when it comes to trust and protection. The keys to the treasury must always be held by them, the keys to secret cupboards containing their corruption files must never be lost—be it the Bofors case, foreign bank accounts, or smuggling of antiquities, to name a few. Hence, the need for an inner circle of family confidants, a second circle of trusted coteries, and an outer circle of sycophants and hangers-on, who are given blandishments and retainers to keep the inner circle protected and take the blame; or do a cover-up job whenever the need arises. When not in power, these coteries and sycophants must engineer and activate cover-up networks, to hush up or obfuscate any exposures. Dynasty converts all the resources and tools of democracy towards achieving these ends, and perpetuate its continuance, while fooling the nation through homilies on transparency and zero tolerance to corruption.

In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions. He claims to be a champion of transparency, but for many years, he’s been helpful to Putin, one of the most repressive and least transparent autocrats in the world. It’s not just that WikiLeaks avoids publishing anything Putin won’t like and instead targets Russia’s adversaries—Assange actually hosted a television show on RT, Putin’s propaganda network, and receives adoring coverage there. And if hypocrisy isn’t bad enough, Assange was charged with rape in Sweden. To avoid facing those charges, he jumped bail and fled to the Ecuadorian embassy in London. After years of waiting, Sweden eventually said it would no longer try to extradite him, but promised that if Assange came back to the country, the investigation could be reopened.

A transparent approach should not merely determine the response to failures; it should infiltrate decisions on strategy and preferment. Meritocracy is synonymous with forward accountability.

Those techniques used in formulating the agenda and making decisions—transparency, inclusiveness, decisiveness, micro-knowledge (but not micromanagement), and accountability—all will continue to be essential in implementation.

Goal setting is more art than science. We weren’t just teaching people how to refine an objective or a measurable key result. We had a cultural agenda, as well. Why is transparency important? Why would you want people across other departments to know your goals? And why does what we’re doing matter? What is true accountability? What’s the difference between accountability with respect (for others’ failings) and accountability with vulnerability (for our own)? How can OKRs help managers “get work done through others”? (That’s a big factor for scalability in a growing company.) How do we engage other teams to adopt our objective as a priority and help assure that we reach it? When is it time to stretch a team’s workload—or to ease off on the throttle? When do you shift an objective to a different team member, or rewrite a goal to make it clearer, or remove it completely? In building contributors’ confidence, timing is everything.

Transparency. Accountability. Communication. They become more important in times of crisis, not less.

As a leader, to what extent do you: —— Establish, recognize, reward, and maintain accountability for goals that contribute to human benefit, so that the effects on other people are obvious? —— Emphasize and reinforce the core values of the individuals who work in the organization, so that congruence between what the organization accomplishes and what people value is transparent? —— Tie the outcomes of the work to an extended time frame, so that long-term benefits are clear? —— Ensure that contribution goals take precedence over acquisition or achievement goals for individuals in the organization?

Awkwardly, judges are free from the accountability of their wrong and illegal verdicts, which openly damage transparent and fair justice.

In raising these issues about the Church, we want to encourage an open discussion that, hopefully, will lead to a more discerning public. We want to cajole: Do take away those blinders, be vigilant. Engage the Church, ask tough questions. Demand accountability, push for transparency.

Not playing the game is the best way to play the game.

Abortion advocates often receive help from politicians in their crusade to discredit pregnancy-resource centers and limit their reach. In California, Democrats passed the “Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act,” which was drafted with the assistance of Planned Parenthood and enforced by two successive state attorneys general, Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra.66 The law required pregnancy-resource centers to post large advertisements for the state’s free or low-cost abortion program. These centers eventually won a challenge against the law at the Supreme Court, which returned the case to a lower court, ruling that California’s statute likely violated the free-speech rights of the pro-life citizens operating the centers.67 California wasn’t alone in this project. Progressive cities across the country have tried to enact policies requiring pregnancy-resource centers to make disclosures that make them sound illegitimate and unqualified to serve pregnant women.68

While in general the governance of speech on social media has been on a trajectory of increased transparency and accountability, the policing of so-called terrorist speech is becoming more and more opaque, and decisions about policies are being made by elites, behind closed doors, absent the meaningful inclusion of civil society … and the communities likely to be most affected by such decisions.

1.2.1 Action item: The U.S. Department of Justice should develop and disseminate case studies that provide examples where past injustices were publicly acknowledged by law enforcement agencies in a manner to help build community trust. 1.3 Recommendation: Law enforcement agencies should establish a culture of transparency and accountability in order to build public trust and legitimacy. This will help ensure decision making is understood and in accord with stated policy.

The suspicion of authority was intrinsic to the post-1960s political left: to rely upon the judgment of experts was to surrender to the prejudices of established elites. Thus, the left had its reasons for advancing an agenda that professed to make institutions accountable and transparent, using the purportedly objective and scientific standards of measured performance.

Modern data analysis techniques should embed human rights principles in algorithms making decisions for humans to ensure transparency and accountability.

The following fundamental principles are core to this standard: Strive to achieve excellence in strategic execution; Enhance transparency, responsibility, accountability, sustainability, and fairness; Balance portfolio value against overall risks; Ensure that investments in portfolio components are aligned with the organization's strategy; Obtain and maintain the sponsorship and engagement of senior management and key stakeholders; Exercise active and decisive leadership for the optimization of resource utilization; Foster a culture that embraces change and risk; and Navigate complexity to enable successful outcomes.

An E. coli outbreak at Chipotle Mexican Grill outlets in October 2015 left fifty-five customers ill and shattered the restaurant chain’s reputation. Sales plummeted, and Chipotle’s share price dropped 42 percent to a three-year low, where it languished through the summer of 2017. At the heart of the Denver-based company’s crisis was the ever-present problem faced by companies that depend on multiple outside suppliers to deliver parts and ingredients: a lack of transparency and accountability across complex supply chains. Many Chipotle patrons probably assumed the outbreak stemmed from poor practices at one of the chain’s restaurants or facilities. But, as painful as that would be for the company’s reputation, the reality was actually worse: Chipotle had no way to pinpoint where the dangerous virus got into its food offerings; it only knew that it came from one of its many third-party beef suppliers. Five months later, the best management could come up with was that it “most likely” came from contaminated Australian beef. At the heart of the problem was the lack of visibility that Chipotle—like any food provider—has over the global supply chain of ingredients that flow into its operations. That lack of knowledge meant that Chipotle could neither prevent the contamination before it happened, nor contain it in a targeted way after it was discovered.

Are your ways of working open, accessible and transparent? Traditional approaches to quantitative data collection and analysis are misunderstood as an objective account of reality; an assumption that masks decisions made throughout the design process. A queer approach to data is also influenced by biases and assumptions; those engaged in queer data practices therefore need to describe how decisions are made, in accessible language, and its effect on the results presented. Openness about the limitations of data helps ensure that an undercount or misrepresentation of data about LGBTQ people is not used undermine political and social advances.

Transparency means taking honesty to the next level. It requires being accountable to your motivations—your true motivations—and identifying them in the first place. If honesty is the what, transparency is the why. Transparency is identifying the reason behind the feelings, the behavior, or the communication breakdown.

After 50 years of independence and several governments, and several elections, we are yet to establish good governance in Trinidad and Tobago. We are yet to fully embrace the principles of democracy, transparency, accountability, integrity. These still elude us and our people are becoming frustrated. We must break out from what I call the clutches of mal-governance. This calls for a new thinking, a paradigm shift. We cannot continue with the same old ways. People are getting tired”. This I believe, was, and still is today the view of many.

He set up a simple program, which he called Algo Transparency, to find out. The program entered a term, like the name of a politician, in YouTube’s search bar. Then it opened the top results. Then each recommendation for what to watch next. He ran huge batches of anonymized searches, one after another, over late 2015 and much of 2016, looking for trends. What he found alarmed him. When he searched YouTube for Pope Francis, for instance, 10 percent of the videos it displayed were conspiracies. On global warming, it was 15 percent. But the real shock came when Chaslot followed algorithmic recommendations for what to watch next, which YouTube has said accounts for most of its watch time. A staggering 85 percent of recommended videos on Pope Francis were conspiracies, asserting Francis’s “true” identity or purporting to expose Satanic plots at the Vatican. On global warming, the figure was 70 percent, usually calling it a hoax. On topics with few established conspiracies, the system seemed to conjure them up. When Chaslot searched Who is Michelle Obama, for instance, just under half of the top results and almost two thirds of watch-next recommendations claimed the First Lady was secretly a man. Surely, he thought, whatever his disagreement with his former colleagues, they would want to know about this. But when he raised concerns privately with people he knew at YouTube, the response was always the same: “If people click on this harmful content, who are we to judge?

If you can’t laugh at yourself you can’t laugh at all.

Provoking and encouraging the killing or committing genocide against men, women, children, and elders, society, or a country is the mother of all crimes. Transparent justice is necessary to hold perpetrators accountable and bring them to justice, which is a bridge to peace and security for all.

In my opinion, truth, transparency, accountability, trust, and loyalty must also be woven into the fabric of every life if we, as a society, community, or country, will ever evolve past our current state of conflict.

As society entrusts more and more decisions to computers, it undermines the viability of democratic self-correcting mechanisms and of democratic transparency and accountability. How can elected officials regulate unfathomable algorithms? There is, consequently, a growing demand to enshrine a new human right: the right-to-an-explanation

Activists are compelled to respond to injustice and speak with the powerless, vulnerable and those without privilege. An activist works to make power transparent, accountable and just. As we are also the butt of many jokes and derisive remarks, it is important to see ourselves in perspective.

The Apologetic Era is about restoring. Restoring confidence. Restoring trust. Restoring health. Restoring faith. Restoring hope, mission, quality, and accountability. It’s about restoring transparency and compassion.

rather than increasing, corruption decreased. This was not achieved spontaneously, however; instead, a series of measures that were effective in tackling this vice were adopted. Transparency was introduced in law. All documents pertaining to the plan, including the selection of people who benefited from programs, accounts, and invoices were considered to be public documents, open and accessible to any citizen.

Established fair trade principles, known to anyone who has purchased coffee with the telltale label, include transparency and accountability, payment of just prices, nondiscrimination and gender and racial equity, and respect for the environment. These principles speak to many of the

Between these amorphous hacker groups and the PLA’s network professionals lies a murky middle layer whose shape, not surprisingly, is indistinct, but whose mission—information warfare (IW)—is not. In 1998 the PRC launched what may have been its first experiment with a cybermilitia: a forty-person unit in a state-owned enterprise in Datong City, Shanxi Province, which had a rich talent pool drawn from some twenty universities, institutes, and companies.48 Militias are neither official government cadres nor freelance hackers. They operate in ambiguous space, connected to one or another government office by a loose string. A twitch of a government finger tightens the string, either to restrain or direct an operation. The PLA has been actively creating IW militias since about 2002, recruiting from universities, research institutes, and commercial IT companies, especially telecom firms. Some accounts call these cadres an “active reserve,” comprising eight million network operators under direct state control.

Now she volunteered to open an account in her name at Yandex Money, the largest online payment service in Russia, in order to collect donations to support the protests. The organizing committee agreed. With Romanova in charge, it meant that nobody would question where the money went, given her unblemished reputation for integrity. The money would be safe from government pressure too; any attempt to intimidate Romanova would clearly be futile. The account at Yandex Money became known as Romanova’s Purse.11 On December 20 Yandex published on Facebook a new application that facilitated crowdfunding through Facebook for Yandex Money. Previously Yandex Money had become a common way for Moscow’s middle class to carry out e-commerce online; people trusted Yandex with their credit cards and used it to make purchases. Now the crowdsourcing application took it to a new level. Protesters were quickly able to utilize a transparent way to collect money for the demonstrations, and it was all done thanks to Internet technology. Romanova was a fearless overseer. Yandex said it was pure coincidence that the new crowdsourcing app was rolled out at the same time that protesters were raising money for the next rally. The next big protest rally was scheduled for December 24 on Prospect Sakharova. Ilya Klishin renamed the main protest event page on Facebook, with the cover photo depicting a wide image of the Bolotnaya crowd and the slogan, “We Were on Bolotnaya and We Are Coming Back,” and on the side carried a picture with the words, “We Are for Fair Elections.” Organizers announced they needed 3 million rubles, about $100,000. Romanova soon collected more than 4 million rubles online and immediately posted a detailed report of how the money would be spent.

sober reality is that the diffusion of power to nonstate actors will not automatically translate into more justice, transparency, accountability, democracy, and human rights. While there is much hope for a better world, it is also possible that individual empowerment will lead to fragmented governance, which in turn will mean poorer governance, which in turn will create worse outcomes rather than better ones

governance is used in the context of how numbers provide an opportunity for transparency and accountability, but it is also related to governance in its more direct sense: numbers provide evidence for decision makers.

I found the sheer vastness of the spying system genuinely shocking, all the more so because it had clearly been implemented with virtually no accountability, no transparency, and no limits. The

In order for most societies to function, people must give others power over themselves. Ceding power is an inherently risky thing to do, and over the millenia we have developed a framework for protecting ourselves even as we do this: transparency, oversight, and accountability. If we know how people are using the power we give them, if we can assure ourselves that they're not abusing it, and if we can punish them if they do, then we can more safely entrust them with power. This is the fundamental social contract of a democracy.

The Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights advances these objectives by holding that consumers have a right to: • Individual Control • Transparency • Respect for Context • Security • Access and Accuracy • Focused Collection • Accountability

Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights applies comprehensive, globally recognized Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) to the interactive and highly interconnected environment in which we live and work today.Specifically, it provides for: − Individual Control: Consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it. − Transparency: Consumers have a right to easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and security practices. − Respect for Context: Consumers have a right to expect that companies will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data. − Security: Consumers have a right to secure and responsible handling of personal data. − Access and Accuracy: Consumers have a right to access and correct personal data in usable formats, in a manner that is appropriate to the sensitivity of the data and the risk of adverse consequences to consumers if the data is inaccurate. − Focused Collection: Consumers have a right to reasonable limits on the personal data that companies collect and retain. − Accountability: Consumers have a right to have personal data handled by companies with appropriate measures in place to assure they adhere to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights★ 1 ★

corruption risk index (8.21) slightly decreased compared to the previous year (8.31), and the accountability index and transparency index scores were lower than those of the previous year. ② Internal Integrity The internal integrity level, evaluated by internal officials, scored 7.93, an increase by 0.08 points compared

The (extremely lavish set) was created by a transparency, a fine gauze, finely painted. According to the theatre accounts, it cost 241 ducats, 91 ducats more than Rossini was paid for the music.

How about transparency and honesty? Bill Clinton lied under oath repeatedly during the Monica investigation, to the point of being disbarred and fined. Subpoenaed legal records of Hillary Clinton turned up (too late) mysteriously in the White House. In the latest email scandal, the mystery was not that Hillary set up a stealthy private communication system to facilitate the Clinton scheme of offering foreign zillionaires the opportunity to give money to the family foundation and huge cash speaking fees for Bill, in exchange for likely favorable U.S. government decisions affecting billions of dollars in international trade and commerce — and perhaps the very security of the United States. We expected even that from Hillary Clinton the moment that she assumed office — in the manner that her husband had once pardoned convicted FALN Puerto Rican terrorists in hopes of winning bloc votes for her New York Senate campaign, in addition to snagging money from convicted felons. That Mrs. Clinton refused to sign disclosure forms and to follow government protocols about donations and correspondence, as she promised she would, was also nothing new. But what was novel was Hillary Clinton’s ability to hold a press conference and lie about every single aspect of her email crimes. Everything she said was untrue: from the nature of smart phones and email accounts, to the email habits of other cabinet officers, to the methods of securing a server, to the mix between public and private communications, to the method of adjudicating her behavior. All were untruths offered without a shred of remorse.