National Sunshine Week

If knowledge is power, information fuels that power. And if the ultimate power in our democratic society is supposed to reside with the people, public access to information determines whether a democratic system succeeds or fails.

It is ironic that in an age where the Internet has opened the floodgates of information to ordinary people, that our culture and society still face the risk of losing access to the information we require to make informed decisions as citizens. Much of the information we need to choose good governments for ourselves, however, resides in the files of those governments at the federal, state, and local level. This week is National Sunshine Week, our opportunity to reflect on the importance of open government.

Forty years ago, before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act into law on the Fourth of July, 1966, information collected and kept by the government was distributed to the public only on a need-to-know basis. The new law established for every citizen a right to know, requiring the government to specify why information should not be released rather than asking the citizens to prove why they needed it. It was a monumental step toward making our democratic system transparent and accountable to the people.

Over the years, the federal Freedom of Information Act, and the many state and local laws it fostered, have been refined to respect personal privacy and to protect information that would harm the public interest if disclosed.

After 9/11, with heightened concerns about national security and the use of public information by terrorists to plan attacks against the United States, there was a significant change in approach by the federal government in providing public access to records. Where there had been a predisposition to disclose information with some exceptions, federal agencies began assuming a default position that information should be withheld — even unclassified information unrelated to national security. Executive orders have created new classifications for documents, such as “For Official Use,” “Sensitive But Unclassified,” and “Not For Public Dissemination,” with no apparent criteria for such designation. And now even historians are finding that archival materials previously made public, some from as far back as 1948, with no relevance to the war on terrorism, are being reclassified and pulled from public view in secret reviews.

Everyone should acknowledge that records and information that would help terrorists attack our country should not be made public. Period. Yet a headlong retreat into secrecy by our government leaders threatens to throw entire precincts of our democracy into the dark. In a poll released last week by the Scripps Survey Research Center, 62 percent of the respondents identified public access to government records as “critical to the functioning of good government.” We should use every resource available to us to thwart those who threaten our democratic system, either wittingly through violence or unwittingly though a negligent disregard for the public’s fundamental right to know.