Digital repositories for government and corporate documents are traveling to computers and homes around the globe nearly as fast as Mercury, the messenger of the gods. One million congressional documents summarizing legislation and various policies of the U.S. government made it into citizens’ in less than a year after the Center for Democracy and Technology opened them to the public. After decades of the licensing of public documents by LexisNexis and Westlaw on questionable terms and conditions, Findlaw, Justia, Resource.org, and Leagle have made thousands of judicial opinions and statutes available to the public free of charge. SECinfo.com and other Web sites have similarly opened thousands or even millions of corporate financial documents to public inspection. The Federation of American Scientists and National Security Archive offer access to vast troves of war and foreign policy memos.
The controversy over the Wikileaks revelations, studied closely by the blogosphere but largely condemned or ignored by newspapers and television commentators, underlines the increasing role of alternative forms of newsgathering, such as nonprofits like ProPublica who break stories like this one about BP’s safety record. Even a team of journalism students and their professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism have helped exonerate up to eleven wrongfully convicted inmates, including five on death row. Where were the large newspaper chains and TV networks? NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen has argued that “ Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.”
About as many read some blogs each day as visit NYTimes.com, and there are millions of active blogs, YouTube accounts, Twitter users, and Facebook pages with quotes or links to documents, many just as important in their own way as the Wikileaks revelations. Compared to the Washington press corps, which needs to maintain good relationships with public officials to preserve their access to interviews, junkets, briefing rooms, the legions of Internet posters, analysts, and aggregators of documents can release more, faster.
President Johnson made a telling handwritten revision to a key passage of his signing statement for the Freedom of Information Act of 1966. I leave you with the initial draft, his revision, and the final version.
Draft Signing Statement for Freedom of Information Act, 1966
President Lyndon Johnson Signing Freedom of Information Act, 1966
