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The Freedom of Information Act is vital for democratic accountability. Understanding who uses it is key to re-centering its oversight purposes.
Today, transparency is a widely heralded value, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is often held up as one of the transparency movement’s canonical achievements. Yet while many view the law as a powerful tool for journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens to pursue the public good, FOIA is beset by massive backlogs, and corporations and the powerful have become adept at using it for their own interests. Close observers of laws like FOIA have begun to question whether these laws interfere with good governance, display a deleterious anti-public-sector bias, or are otherwise inadequate for the twenty-first century’s challenges. Troubling Transparency brings together leading scholars from different disciplines to analyze freedom of information policies in the United States and abroad—how they are working, how they are failing, and how they might be improved. Contributors investigate the creation of FOIA; its day-to-day uses and limitations for the news media and for corporate and citizen requesters; its impact on government agencies; its global influence; recent alternatives to the FOIA model raised by the emergence of “open data” and other approaches to transparency; and the theoretical underpinnings of FOIA and the right to know. In addition to examining the mixed legacy and effectiveness of FOIA, contributors debate how best to move forward to improve access to information and government functioning. Neither romanticizing FOIA nor downplaying its real and symbolic achievements, Troubling Transparency is a timely and comprehensive consideration of laws such as FOIA and the larger project of open government, with wide-ranging lessons for journalism, law, government, and civil society.
Annotation An examination of the origins of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), its effective use, the uneasy acceptance of the FOIA by federal agencies and the current impediments to its full application.
The "Overview of the Privacy Act of 1974," prepared by the Department of Justice's Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties (OPCL), is a discussion of the Privacy Act's disclosure prohibition, its access and amendment provisions, and its agency recordkeeping requirements. Tracking the provisions of the Act itself, the Overview provides reference to, and legal analysis of, court decisions interpreting the Act's provisions.
This book presents a comparative study on access to public information in the context of the main legal orders worldwide(inter alia China,France,Germany,Japan,Russia,Sweden,United States).The international team of authors analyzes the Transparency- and Freedom-to-Information legislation with regard to the scope of the right to access, limitations of this right inherent in the respective national laws, the procedure, the relationship with domestic legislation on administrative procedure, as well as judicial protection. It particularly focuses on the Brazilian law establishing the right of access to information, which is interpreted as a benchmark for regulations in other Latin-American states.
The American founders did not endorse a citizen’s right to know. More openness in government, more frankness in a doctor’s communication with patients, more disclosure in a food manufacturer’s package labeling, and more public notice of actions that might damage the environment emerged in our own time. As Michael Schudson shows in The Rise of the Right to Know, modern transparency dates to the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—well before the Internet—as reform-oriented politicians, journalists, watchdog groups, and social movements won new leverage. At the same time, the rapid growth of higher education after 1945, together with its expansive ethos of inquiry and criticism, fostered both insight and oversight as public values. “One of the many strengths of The Rise of the Right To Know is its insistent emphasis on culture and its interaction with law...What Schudson shows is that enforceable access to official information creates a momentum towards a better use of what is disclosed and a refinement of how disclosure is best done.” —George Brock, Times Literary Supplement “This book is a reminder that the right to know is not an automatic right. It was hard-won, and fought for by many unknown political soldiers.” —Monica Horten, LSE Review of Books