Florida Today

It’s your right to know

Sunshine Sunday casts spotlight on dangerous moves to run government in the dark

The less you know, the easier you are to manipulate and deceive.

That’s why unjustified secrecy in government is so inherently dangerous to our democracy and should be fiercely resisted.

Yet each year state and federal officials keep pushing to keep more information hidden from view.

To combat that dangerous trend, news organizations around Florida and the nation turn the spotlight today — which is Sunshine Sunday and the start of Sunshine Week — on the rising tide of governmental secrecy and call for greater protection of the public’s right to know.

Make no mistake. That right is in real danger. But this year, there’s good news to report from Tallahassee.

Florida’s tradition of government-in-the-sunshine got a shot in the arm when a new governor came to town in January.

At his inauguration, Gov. Charlie Crist pledged, “Our Constitution requires that our government be open and transparent and, under my administration, it will be like never before.”

Crist has created an Office of Open Government to give you better access to information about the workings of the state, including a Web site at www.flgov.com/og_home.

The office will hold regional conferences this fall to train officials on complying with Sunshine Laws.

Those are a huge improvements over policies of predecessor Gov. Jeb Bush, who undermined public access to information whenever possible.

We hope Crist’s crusade to let the light shine in is sincere, and trickles down through every hall of government, beginning with the Legislature, where lawmakers once again have filed many bills affecting public records and open meetings.

Special interest scourge

Thousands of exemptions have already been carved out of the state’s constitutional guarantee of public access, and some do have merit.

For instance, bills calling for creating a paper trail in Florida’s voting system this year are needed to rebuild public confidence in elections.

But most just create exemptions as favors to special interests, who profit when they can hide facts that could hurt business.

Last year lawmakers — including all of Brevard’s legislators — voted to seal the state’s concealed weapons permits list, despite a South Florida Sun-Sentinel analysis that found thousands of criminals were licensed to carry hidden guns.

Other exemptions hide facts about deals that economic development groups make with private companies — your tax dollars, but you can’t see how they’re spent.

Another allows nursing homes to keep adverse-incident reports under wraps.

And the list just keeps getting longer.

Bad bills lawmakers are pushing this year would:

• Keep secret information about CEO searches at public hospitals, setting a dangerous precedent for closing off the candidate selection process for other public positions — such as school superintendents.
• Create public records exemptions on personal information that could make it impossible to release the names of convicted criminals in the community — or find out how powerful lobbyists are spending dollars to buy influence in government.
• Make it a third-degree felony for an individual such as a reporter, but not for corporations, to have “sensitive personal” information, unless they have permission to do so, virtually denying the press the right to investigate wrongdoing.

Obsessive Bush secrecy

There’s even more cause for alarm in Washington. A new poll conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors that showed 69 percent of Americans say the federal government is “somewhat secretive” or “very secretive.”

That’s an understatement. More accurately, the Bush administration can be described as pathologically obsessed with secrecy.

It has systematically expanded executive privilege to block release of records, from information about the war in Iraq, to historical documents about former presidents and even visitors logs showing who — such as former lobbyist and now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff — enters the White House.

The White House has denied congressional investigators access to information, and claimed “state secrets” privilege to thwart oversight of domestic surveillance programs and prevent investigation of its illegal detention and treatment of prisoners or war.

To a paranoid degree, the Bush administration “claims national security interests where are none,” says Charles Davis, executive director of the Freedom of Information Center at University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Right now, for example, it’s denying access to maps that show where flooding would result if a problem-plagued dam north of Louisville, Ky., breaks — illogically putting lives at risk, says Davis.

Meanwhile cutbacks in staff who process Freedom of Information Act requests at federal agencies have created huge backlogs, blacking out citizen access.

President John F. Kennedy was correct in saying, “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society.”

Democracy can all too easily be replaced by tyranny, if the public doesn’t stand up and fight to preserve that truth.

And that’s what you must do today and every day to preserve your precious right to know.

Reproduced courtesy of Florida Today.
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