No, the seven-day event that started this past Sunday has nothing to do with UV rays. Nor, is it a pathetic attempt to put a cheery spin on global warming.
It’s about freedom of information, specifically the right of a citizenry to know what its government is doing, and the erosion of democracy that occurs when any government—city, state or national— tries to do its business in secret.
Sunshine Week was started in 2002 by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors after a group of troglodyte legislators attempted to cripple the state’s public records law with a series of new exemptions. Hoping to stimulate public outcry about the clamp down, the Florida editors originally declared Sunshine Sunday. On that day newspapers around the state ran a series of reports and editorial commentaries explaining what was going on in the capitol building and what Floridians ought to do about it.
It worked. When the editors kept up the strategy for three Sundays running, a persistent stream of unhappy voters flooded the state house with calls, e-mails, and letters. The upshot was that some 300 exemptions to open government laws were defeated in the legislative sessions that followed the so-called Sunshine Sundays.
Two years ago, the American Society of Newspaper Editors grabbed the idea and took it national. Thus Sunshine Sunday turned into National Sunshine Week. The idea is to motivate public debate about the recent trends toward government secrecy, most prominent among those trends, the ongoing attempts by the Bush administration to severely curtail the 38-year old Freedom of Information Act.
This year Sunshine Week kicked off on March 11 and runs until Saturday, March 17 (which not-so-coincidentally happens to be the birthday James Madison, the father of the Bill of Rights).
The past two days have already stimulated some excellent and alarming articles that make for essential reading, with more still to come.
First on your suggested reading list is this report by my very smart friend Martha Mendoza of the AP. It is scheduled to run in various newspapers around the country tomorrow. Editor and Publisher has it today.
Here are some excerpts:
The locations of stores and restaurants that have received recalled meat, the names of detainees held by the U.S. overseas, and details about Vice President Dick Cheney’s 2001 energy policy task force are all among the records that the government isn’t sharing with the public.
The tightening began even before the Sept. 11 attacks, and now government defenders say the nation needs protection from its enemies in the war on terror. But open-government advocates worry that U.S. citizens’ freedom is eroding with every file they can’t access.
“This is an immensely troubling clampdown,” said Steve Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy Project. “The law itself is unchanged, but it’s being interpreted more broadly to withhold more information.”
…The federal government — not including the CIA — created 14 million new classified documents in fiscal year 2003, a 60 percent increase over 2001, according to the Information Security Oversight Office. At the same time, the agency reports that it cut back on the number of documents that were declassified.
“The Bush administration’s attitude is that public information is largely a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Because there’s some people who could use this information improperly, we shouldn’t let anybody see it. I just think secrecy of that nature is almost always the exact wrong decision,” said Harry Hammitt, who publishes Access Reports, a newsletter on Freedom of Information laws.
Read the whole thing. It’s worth it.
I applaud the concern of the American Scoiety of Newspaper Editors to bring a little sunshine into the news. When does it start?
I like “Sunshine Week” so much, that I’m going to demand that the NY Times, Newsweek, CBS, etc. start naming all of their “unidentified but reliable sources.”
Remind me again how it works in Los Angeles. Are the police open about rogue cops? Is the public notified whenever a cop is accused of misconduct? Can I walk into Parker Center and see a police officer’s discipline record? Is the LAPD accountable to the public it serves? And, a bit off topic, wouldn’t L.A. Unified be better off if Chief Bratton took it over instead of that guy who flunked the bar exam three times?
I note that my Senator, John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy (D) have joined forces to pass a “FOIA” change. That can be good news, but like most congressional endeavors, it will include many things it shouldn’t and leave out some things it should include. Perhaps that is just the cynic in me but it is also based on history.
They released a statement here which also has a link to the proposed bill: http://cornyn.senate.gov/index.asp?f=record&lid=1&rid=237355
Or, if that doesn’t work, here is a link to the PDF of the proposal:
http://cornyn.senate.gov/doc_archive/OPEN-gvt-act-2007.pdf
Cheers Rosedoggie and keep us posted!
I have no problem with some secrecy for the sake of our security. We don’t need to tell terrorists all of our means of gathering intelligence and other plans just so that the NY Times can publish an article undermining our safety, like they did when they published the article about the U.S. tracking financial transactions of terrorists. Was it so important for the general public to know that information at the cost of our government losing a vital weapon in this war? Does the NY Times care so much about wanting President Bush to fail that risking American lives are worth it?
While the media cries for open records, they need to look at themselves and see if they are using that previously secret information responsibly. I have more trust in the American government than I do left-wing media.