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Internet ups the stakes on open government By Mark Lane Nobody in public life wants to be against Florida’s Sunshine and open government laws. Most know the Sunshine Amendment passed with 79 percent of the vote and the another amendment protecting the law passed with 76 percent of the vote. Most know the surest way to convince Florida voters that you’re pulling off a scam is to declare any kind of government-contracting information or plans for a special tax benefit to be secret and off-limits to the public. And yet, every year they keep trying to weaken the laws. Each year the Legislature comes up with new, wildly broad Sunshine Law exemptions and dare the courts to strike them down. Each year local governments around the state come up with ever more ingenious ways to hide their work from public view. And when officials from all levels of government get together, about the only thing they usually agree upon is that it’s a shame the way they are hobbled by the law and how dynamic and effective they would be if they could only be unshackled to work effectively in secret. This is a pervasive, almost unconscious, belief. A deeply held prejudice that stems from the touching idea that government is run by competent, and rational scientific managers who must drag an unwitting citizenry into the bold, gleaming future. Because of the unshakable faith among many smart operators in government that secrecy equals effectiveness, secrecy equals efficiency and secrecy equal security, the job of keeping government open where it is open and prying it open where it is shut, takes endless work. This work is about to get harder. Harder for a number of reasons. But a big one is advances in Internet technology. Yes, the Internet. Information may want to be free, as the slogan of bloggers and ’Net activist proclaims, but the Internet has upped the stakes when government information is public. When open records laws were written in the 1970s, they meant letting individuals see what was in the file cabinets and get photocopies what they wanted. Now, if a document is public, it might be scanned, copied, posted on a Web site, added to a database, e-mailed around and searchable on Google. The impact of the public-records law used to be softened by the simple limits of passing paper around. If somebody obtained a county record or minutes to a meeting, big deal. It wouldn’t mean everyone in town would see it, too. Now, if a record is open, anyone on the planet might see it. This doesn’t change the reasons for open government. If anything, it is an improvement because people can more efficiently be made aware of what their government does. But it does mean a huge difference in scale. It raises the stakes for disclosure of any public record. To people in government who already dislike people looking over their shoulder – and who doesn’t? — the post-Internet public records law is something very scary, indeed. It gives people predisposed to secrecy new and more reasonable-sounding excuses. “Do you want this all over the Internet?” This forces those who support open government to “go big or go home.” It means open-records advocates must make the case that these laws are not paper-only laws from a paper-only age. If we don’t watch out, the Internet will soon be – like terrorism — an all-purpose vaguely-evoked excuse for closing any public record. It shouldn’t be. Open means open.
Mark Lane is The Daytona Beach News-Journal’s metro columnist. |
