Don Moynihan writes:

Scott Kupor, the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, explained why nearly every federal employee should sign a Non Disclosure Agreement

In much of the private sector, employees handling sensitive business or customer information are routinely required to sign confidentiality agreements, and the federal government should not be held to a lower standard.

Set aside the small problem that Kupor — previously a longtime executive at Andreessen Horowitz — does not work in the private sector anymore, and that the public sector has somewhat different normative expectations about transparency than a venture capital fund. There is another problem with his argument: venture capitalists themselves famously refuse to sign NDAs. They know what NDAs are and are not for. They are not, mostly, for protecting genuinely sensitive information.

So what are NDAs for? NDAs are a tool of the powerful to protect themselves by threatening the less powerful. The private sector has used them so promiscuously and so abusively that they should be a warning for the public sector, not a model for it. [Continue reading…]