U.S. Freedom of Information Act Seen as Good Model for Others
Washington — A 43-year-old law for keeping the U.S. government open and transparent, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), is a model for other nations, says Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive (NSA), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that uses FOIA to collect and publish declassified documents.
“The principle of free information is vital” to a functioning democracy, Blanton told America.gov during a June 1 interview in his office at George Washington University.
Since FOIA’s inception in 1966, the federal government has released millions of documents requested by individuals, corporations and NGOs. The law, which applies to all agencies in the executive branch of government, is administered by the Department of Justice. Exemptions to FOIA include certain classified foreign relations documents, national defense information and proprietary business information and trade secrets.
Blanton said FOIA is not just for journalists, researchers and scholars. “Senior citizens, military veterans and businesses make up the bulk of requests for government information” in the United States, he said.
A “CHECK ON POWER”
The United States’ FOIA process has been a model for nations that have developed similar laws, Blanton said. “And we have also used the process to get more closed societies like Cuba, Vietnam and Russia to open up their government archives,” he said.
Blanton said there has been “an openness revolution,” particularly in the 1990s when the number of countries that have FOIA-type laws “went from about a dozen to today, about 80.”
FOIA is basically “a check on power,” Blanton said. “People in places like India, Mexico, Argentina and Hungary decided that they needed the right to know what their governments were up to; a lesson they learned from corruption, abuse of power, military dictatorships or communist totalitarianism.”
“The natural propensity of any bureaucracy is to control its own information,” Blanton said. “But members of government are just its custodians, and the only reason to keep secrets is if government can identify the harm if they are released and you have a working check and balances and appeal process” for citizens making inquiries.
Since its founding in 1985, NSA has made more than 37,000 FOIA requests. In 2008 alone, NSA filed 1,200 requests, resulting in the release of 62,000 pages of documents.
Blanton said NSA advocates for the release of documents primarily to open a window into government decisionmaking, “in order to broaden the historical record.”
“Basically, we have become an institutional memory for FOIA,” he added, and the NSA archive now ranges from documents shedding new light on the Cuban missile crisis of the early 1960s to the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s.
“One of our biggest coups,” Blanton said, was recently winning a lawsuit forcing the government to save White House e-mail from President Reagan’s time in office in the 1980s. “The National Archives did not define e-mails as records, and so without our lawsuit, e-mails in electronic form would not have been preserved.” (The National Archives and Records Administration is the official record keeper for the United States.)
A considerable body of records was at issue in the lawsuit, he said: 130,000 to 200,000 White House e-mail messages in the Reagan years; 200,000 to 500,000 under President George H.W. Bush; and 32 million from President Bill Clinton. The estimate from President George W. Bush’s administration is 220 million e-mails.
“Nobody is going to be able to look at every page, but since they are in electronic form, you’ll be able to use algorithms and search engines to find information,” Blanton explained.
FOIA’S IMPACT OVERSEAS
Blanton said, “Another big success has been taking documents we’ve gotten through the American FOIA to foreign countries that are still largely closed, like China, Cuba, Vietnam” and Russia after the fall of communism.
“Showing them what American documents say threatens to tell the history from our perspective rather than theirs, and this poses an interesting challenge for them to open up,” he explained.
“We did just such a presentation for [Cuban] President Fidel Castro in 1992 with about 20,000 pages of American documents we retrieved through FOIA,” Blanton said. “Castro’s response was to snap his fingers and three guys came out with archival boxes, and he proceeded to pull out documents, exclaiming things like: ‘Oh, what about that letter [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev sent me apologizing for taking out the missiles without telling me beforehand.’ Nobody had ever heard of that in Western historiography.”
Some of these meetings with leaders of more closed societies actually have led to unveiling of new information, Blanton said. “For example, from the Gorbachev Foundation [founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union] we got the transcript of his meeting with President George H.W. Bush at Malta [in December 1989]; the American version is still classified and has not yet been released.”
Malcolm Byrne, NSA deputy director and director of research, said NSA was also working with a number of countries to help develop or strengthen their own FOIA laws. He mentioned that Blanton and an NSA team recently visited Georgia and are working with lawmakers there to set up a functioning information-access process.
NSA has also helped train journalists and others on how to use FOIA laws to investigate stories. The training aims to encourage journalists to lessen their mistrust for government by seeing how they can work with the government to gain access to information.
“The principle of free information is vital” to a functioning democracy, Blanton told America.gov during a June 1 interview in his office at George Washington University.
Since FOIA’s inception in 1966, the federal government has released millions of documents requested by individuals, corporations and NGOs. The law, which applies to all agencies in the executive branch of government, is administered by the Department of Justice. Exemptions to FOIA include certain classified foreign relations documents, national defense information and proprietary business information and trade secrets.
Blanton said FOIA is not just for journalists, researchers and scholars. “Senior citizens, military veterans and businesses make up the bulk of requests for government information” in the United States, he said.
A “CHECK ON POWER”
The United States’ FOIA process has been a model for nations that have developed similar laws, Blanton said. “And we have also used the process to get more closed societies like Cuba, Vietnam and Russia to open up their government archives,” he said.
Blanton said there has been “an openness revolution,” particularly in the 1990s when the number of countries that have FOIA-type laws “went from about a dozen to today, about 80.”
FOIA is basically “a check on power,” Blanton said. “People in places like India, Mexico, Argentina and Hungary decided that they needed the right to know what their governments were up to; a lesson they learned from corruption, abuse of power, military dictatorships or communist totalitarianism.”
“The natural propensity of any bureaucracy is to control its own information,” Blanton said. “But members of government are just its custodians, and the only reason to keep secrets is if government can identify the harm if they are released and you have a working check and balances and appeal process” for citizens making inquiries.
Since its founding in 1985, NSA has made more than 37,000 FOIA requests. In 2008 alone, NSA filed 1,200 requests, resulting in the release of 62,000 pages of documents.
Blanton said NSA advocates for the release of documents primarily to open a window into government decisionmaking, “in order to broaden the historical record.”
“Basically, we have become an institutional memory for FOIA,” he added, and the NSA archive now ranges from documents shedding new light on the Cuban missile crisis of the early 1960s to the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s.
“One of our biggest coups,” Blanton said, was recently winning a lawsuit forcing the government to save White House e-mail from President Reagan’s time in office in the 1980s. “The National Archives did not define e-mails as records, and so without our lawsuit, e-mails in electronic form would not have been preserved.” (The National Archives and Records Administration is the official record keeper for the United States.)
A considerable body of records was at issue in the lawsuit, he said: 130,000 to 200,000 White House e-mail messages in the Reagan years; 200,000 to 500,000 under President George H.W. Bush; and 32 million from President Bill Clinton. The estimate from President George W. Bush’s administration is 220 million e-mails.
“Nobody is going to be able to look at every page, but since they are in electronic form, you’ll be able to use algorithms and search engines to find information,” Blanton explained.
FOIA’S IMPACT OVERSEAS
Blanton said, “Another big success has been taking documents we’ve gotten through the American FOIA to foreign countries that are still largely closed, like China, Cuba, Vietnam” and Russia after the fall of communism.
“Showing them what American documents say threatens to tell the history from our perspective rather than theirs, and this poses an interesting challenge for them to open up,” he explained.
“We did just such a presentation for [Cuban] President Fidel Castro in 1992 with about 20,000 pages of American documents we retrieved through FOIA,” Blanton said. “Castro’s response was to snap his fingers and three guys came out with archival boxes, and he proceeded to pull out documents, exclaiming things like: ‘Oh, what about that letter [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev sent me apologizing for taking out the missiles without telling me beforehand.’ Nobody had ever heard of that in Western historiography.”
Some of these meetings with leaders of more closed societies actually have led to unveiling of new information, Blanton said. “For example, from the Gorbachev Foundation [founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union] we got the transcript of his meeting with President George H.W. Bush at Malta [in December 1989]; the American version is still classified and has not yet been released.”
Malcolm Byrne, NSA deputy director and director of research, said NSA was also working with a number of countries to help develop or strengthen their own FOIA laws. He mentioned that Blanton and an NSA team recently visited Georgia and are working with lawmakers there to set up a functioning information-access process.
NSA has also helped train journalists and others on how to use FOIA laws to investigate stories. The training aims to encourage journalists to lessen their mistrust for government by seeing how they can work with the government to gain access to information.
No comments:
Post a Comment