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foiac.org Freedom of Information Advocacy Coalition |
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The Freedom of Information Act - 40th Anniversary on July 4th 2006
One of those jewels of the US constitutional checks and balances is the Freedom of Information Act. It was not included in the Bill of Rights in 1791. But somewhere on the long road that led to our current ubiquitous government, a new component was born out of necessity. The Freedom of Information (FOI) Act was signed into law on Independence Day 1966.
The FOI Act, US Code 532, entitles you to ask government entities what exactly they do and the policy details of how they do it. You can request documents about specific events such as memoranda about specific decision making processes and the data that informed them.
Without effective monitoring processes there would be little capability for citizens to audit the performance of our vast government enterprise. No hope of getting the real data or producing informed critiques of any complex issues, policies or decisions; from Star Wars to national energy policy, or anything in between.
This makes FOI principles important to us all - it is just as essential for liberals as it is for conservatives. Auditing, or the possibility of auditing, is how everybody is kept honest; be it filing taxes, or running a corporation, or running a government agency. FOIA is the people’s auditing tool.
The FOI Act really was an evolutionary leap in the long road refining government of, by, and for the people. It was such a compelling evolutionary advance that it subsequently spawned sunshine and foi laws in all 50 states. By its enthusiastic adoption at all levels of government it surely vies for a place in the Parthenon of “self-evident truths”.
On that Independence Day 40 years ago, the FOI Act embraced democracy with Jeffersonian zest and empowered every one of us to stand before the government as our own ombudsman.
In the wake of September 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft sent a memo to all federal departments formalizing the Bush administration's antipathy to this 40-year-old cornerstone of government transparency. The logic was that open government was somehow more vulnerable to terrorist attack than the opaque varieties. The policy might now be couched in terms of "hunkering down and pulling the shades against terrorists". Yet it is fairly certain that terrorists do not file many requests for information via foi requests. They are just not that patient and document dumps about government minutia and procedures do not really open windows that terrorists can fly through.
The present Washington administration has been characterized as one of the most secretive administrations in decades. Statutes like Freedom of Information and other Sunshine Laws are suffering from emasculation and are in danger of being turned into empty tokens of government transparency. If we lose the tools of auditing the their activities, the government will disappear down murky labyrinthine corridors well beyond our access or understanding or control.
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