Ain't No Sunshine: Promoting Open Government | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 07/16/2009

I knew when I browsed the ALA program that one of the speakers I wanted to be sure to hear was Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a trove of official documents liberated thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.

Quite a few librarians apparently agreed with me, to go by the large crowd in attendance. Blanton was funny, inspiring, informative, and quite often alarming. He pointed out that information has been massively over-classified, sometimes capriciously depending on that week's headlines, usually because the information is evidence of behavior or decisions that are embarrassing to government officials, not because sharing that information would endanger our safety.

As one official reportedly said, information had to be classified or “it might end up on the Daily Show" subject to ridicule. Vague and generalized anxiety about a country that is in the news can lead to the disappearance of information about it in government documents for no real reason. And next week, when another hotspot makes the front page, documents go silent about that part of the world.

Public knowledge is safer than secrecy
Enter the Freedom of Information Act. According to Blanton, the National Security Archive has filed some 36,000 FOIA requests and collected somewhere between eight to ten million documents as a result. These documents have illuminated Cold War intelligence activities, Nixon and the FBI, and the recent far reach of the National Security Agency (NSA).

In his talk, Blanton described cases in which publicity proved to be far more effective for public safety than limiting information. For example, in the case of the D.C. sniper, a prosecutor used her head and leaked to the press a description of the vehicle the suspects were driving, information that had only been shared among law enforcement. Within an hour a good tip came in, and the snipers were stopped after weeks of random terror.

Knowledge is power. Knowledge withheld concentrates power in the hands of a few people who apparently are more concerned about hording power than about national security. Shared knowledge is real power, a principle that is fundamental to libraries.

The “need to know” cordon thrown around sensitive information means people who know can’t compare notes, connect dots, and draw conclusions. Blanton pointed to the fact that FBI agents at several field offices were aware of instances of suspicious behavior at flight training schools, but not only were they not allowed to connect the dots among themselves, those who were inside the “need to know“ cordon didn‘t bother. We now know just how well that bureaucratized veil of secrecy protected us.

Blanton pointed out the ways that the previous administration tried to “put the toothpaste back into the tube” by bizarrely reclassifying documents that had already been declassified. One interesting project is doing “DNA” comparisons to see which bits have been redacted. Once you can examine the patterns, it’s obvious that national security is not at issue. Too often, government wrongdoing is being covered up, and often capriciously. Many honorable public servants were deliberately left outside of the “need to know” circle because they took their oath to defend and protect the constitution seriously.

Forecast: partly sunny with a chance of concealment
Though President Obama campaigned on transparency and accountability, and even though he is ensuring that all of his electronic communications are backed up twice—rather than being destroyed, hidden, or routed through party networks to avoid being part of the public record—he continues to invoke the State Secrets Act, fights a lawsuit to hold the NSA accountable for massive warrantless wiretapping and decided to prohibit release of torture photos.

We know that photos, such as the Abu Ghraib gallery of humiliation and torture, are upsetting. But it’s not the photos that are upsetting: it’s the behavior that was captured on film. In the case of Abu Ghraib, a few low-level officers paid the price for carrying out policies set at the highest level. The torture photos being withheld now are direct evidence of crimes that can’t be attributed to a few “bad apples” but which were determined to be best intelligence practices by a select few. Suppressing the photos won’t change the distressing facts. It just conceals the evidence.

The problem of government secrecy is not a partisan issue. It’s an issue that lies at the heart of the purpose and nature of libraries. Promoting openness is our mission. It’s not enough to provide access to government documents. We need to inform our patrons about the government documents they can’t see, and help them understand the significant social and political cost of government secrecy.

I recently tried to help a student locate an obscure State Department report cited in a CRS report. It wasn’t distributed to depository libraries, it wasn’t on the web, it wasn’t in the catalog of any library. I tried to contact the agency that published it but got no result. Meanwhile, I sent the student a link to the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press handy-dandy FOIA letter generator, warning him it might take a little time and there would probably be processing fees. He wrote back to say he'd give FOIA a whirl.

Tom Blanton told us he filed his first FOIA request in 1976 when working for a weekly newspaper in Minnesota. Now, tens of thousands of requests later, the web site of the organization he directs demonstrates just how valuable this legal tool is, not just for reporters but for any citizen seeking information that may be capriciously or inappropriately withheld by the government. The National Security Archives is a gallery of just how important our right to know is for democracy. And even though I couldn't quickly produce the information my student needed, I was able to give him a tool that he can use in future when the government information he needs can't be found online or in a library.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

Read more Newswire stories:

SPARC-ACRL Forum: Doomsday Clock Countdown for Scholarly Communications?

ALA Conference 2009: Ubiquity of Mobiles To Impact Libraries

ALA Conference 2009: Top Provocative Tech Trends

ALA Conference 2009: In Academic-Public Library Collaborations, Each Case is Different

Michigan Governor Proposes Killing Department of History, Arts, & Libraries, Dropping State Librarian

Newswire Feature: Veteran Librarians

Columns:
More Remote Learners in Your Future | From the Bell Tower

Encore Reporter from III; SirsiDynix announces Enterprise 3.0 and Symphony 3.3; Gale gets Penguin Rough Guides; EBSCO partners with Ex Libris; and more from ebrary, Blackwell, and Ingram Digital

Best Sellers in Computer Science