National Freedom of Information Day affords a possibility to replicate on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and what it means for residents of the United States. It celebrates the March sixteenth birthday of U.S. President James Madison (1751 – 1846), who was a powerful advocate for transparency in authorities.
FOIA was conceived by John Moss, a Democrat elected to Congress in 1952 throughout the heightened secrecy of the Cold War. He believed that “The current pattern towards authorities secrecy might finish in a dictatorship. The extra data that’s made out there, the higher will likely be the nation’s safety.” After greater than a decade of effort to make authorities extra open, he rallied sufficient assist to move FOIA. On July 4, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act into regulation, regardless of his reservations about its potential to restrict the effectivity of communication between authorities officers. In its favor, he stated, “A democracy works greatest when the folks have all the data that the safety of the Nation permits. No one ought to be capable of pull curtains of secrecy round selections which may be revealed with out harm to the public curiosity.”
According to the Freedom of Information Act web site, the act “typically gives that any particular person has the proper to request entry to federal company information or data besides to the extent the information are protected against disclosure by any of 9 exemptions contained in the regulation or by one of three particular regulation enforcement file exclusions.” (See the FOIA web site for particulars of the exemptions and exclusions.) FOIA has allowed folks to reveal varied sorts of authorities misconduct, together with wasteful spending in restoration efforts after Hurricane Katrina, the crash of a B-52 bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb in 1961 (it simply barely escaped detonation), and — over a five-decade span — the FBI’s surveillance of dozens of well-known African American writers.
To Name This Day . . .
Quotes
From the following quotes, you possibly can see that freedom of data is a global concern. As you learn them, give thanks for the proper to data you do have, and recommit to availing your self of that proper for the profit of all.
“The right to know is the right to live.”
— Aruna Roy, Indian political and social activist
“I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society…. if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.”
— Sissela Bok, Swedish thinker
“The primary objective of FOIA is to make sure an knowledgeable citizenry, very important to the functioning of a democratic society, wanted to test towards corruption and to carry the governors accountable to the ruled.”
— United States Supreme Court in NLRB v. Robbins Tire Co.
“The overarching purpose of access to information legislation … is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry.”
— Gerard LaForest, Supreme Court Justice of Canada in Dagg vs. Canada
“Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
— Motto of The Washington Post, adopted in 2017
Spiritual Practices
On Freedom of Information Day, the American Library Association provides awards “to acknowledge these people or teams which have championed, protected, and promoted public entry to authorities data and the public’s proper to know.” If you had been giving such an award in the present day, to whom would you give it? What is it about them that conjures up you? Reflect on one factor you are able to do to emulate their intent to be told and to maintain others knowledgeable.
