Private: Why Government Transparency is Vital to Democracy

By Melanie Sloan, executive director, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Sloan participated in a recent ACS panel discussion on national security, government transparency, and the First Amendment. Her guest blog is adapted from comments she gave during the event. Video of the event is available here.

In 2007, an archivist digging through a batch of military papers discovered a handwritten note by Abraham Lincoln exhorting his generals to pursue Robert E. Lee's army after the battle of Gettysburg, underscoring one of the great missed opportunities for an early end to the Civil War.

The note says ''the rebellion will be over'' if only ''Gen. Meade can complete his work.'' Lincoln says he wants the ''substantial destruction of Lee's army.''

A week after Lincoln's note, the Confederate army slipped across the Potomac River into Virginia and the war continued for two more years.

Though Gen. George Meade led the Northern troops in the battle at Gettysburg that marked the turning point of the war, he has always been faulted for not closing in and destroying Lee's army.

Historians said the letter reinforced the idea that Lincoln desperately sought to turn Gettysburg into a decisive victory that would have stopped the bloodshed.

Although General Meade had communicated the notes contents to others at the time, finding the original document pinned down what Lincoln was thinking and provided validation.

The discovery of this letter was widely publicized, its contents were analyzed and dissected and scholars reconsidered an important period in our nation's history through the prism of this significant new information.

In 2006, thanks to a tip, the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) discovered that millions of emails had gone missing from White House servers during the Bush administration. Though the White House initially denied this, it turned out to be true. Emails from numerous White House components, including the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President went missing from the period of the beginning of the war with Iraq, from October 2003 through March 2005. Some of those documents might have provided insight into the administration's rationale for that war and some of those documents might have shed light on the administration's decision to leak Valerie Plame Wilson's covert identity to the press.

Documents like the Lincoln letter inform us about what really happened - whether 160 years ago in the civil war or within the last 10 years in the case of the Iraq war - and shape our understanding of our history, whether recent or long past. And access to such information heavily depends on an open government.

Open government is widely considered a tenet of democracy. Our founders valued open government. James Madison stated, "A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both."

Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 and many other countries, including Denmark, Norway, France, Australia, Japan, South Korea, India and Mexico have passed similar laws.

In fact, the notion that government should be open to public scrutiny and criticism dates back to the Enlightenment when intellectuals criticized state secrecy. The idea of a free press stems from this view.

Organizations like CREW, OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation have counterparts across the globe, including Transparency International and the Open Society, all of which advocate open and transparent government based on the concept that such standards are vital to ongoing prosperity and development.

Democracy values engaged citizens who take part in running the country and public participation requires access to information. Recognizing this, Congress designed the FOIA to ensure an informed citizenry, which is vital to the functioning of a democratic society. Open government checks against corruption and allows the governed to hold the governors accountable. The FOIA protects the public's right to know what their government is up to by piercing the veil of administrative secrecy and opening agency action to the light of public scrutiny.

The power and importance of open government was demonstrated just yesterday in a New York Times story documenting the government's treatment of Nazi's over the last half-century. The government tried to suppress a historical report concluding that American intelligence officials in some ways created a "safe haven" for Nazi collaborators. Parts of the report were disclosed after a four-year FOIA battle, and the Times obtained an unredacted version. Opening this document up allows the public to hold accountable the responsible officials and agencies, and lets us better understand our history so that we can address our mistakes.

President Obama also has recognized the importance of transparency. He issued a memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies declaring: "Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

The memo specifically recognized that transparency promotes accountability and he called information maintained by the Federal Government a "national asset." He has directed his administration to disclose information whenever possible and is dedicated to using new technology to do so. The same directive encourages public participation and collaboration.

The memo resulted in a December 2009 Open Government Directive instructing agencies to take specific actions to implement the principles in the memo. Agencies were instructed to publish government information on line, improve the quality of government information, institutionalize a culture of transparency and openness, and create a framework for transparency with new technology.

All of this sounds great and we applaud the president for his clear desire to create a more open government. Still, it all hasn't gone quite as planned. Based on our own experiences and those of some of our colleagues in the transparency community, government openness, has not necessarily been remarkably better under the Obama administration than it was under the Bush administration. CREW conducted a survey of FOIA officers to discover their perceptions of whether information is more freely and easily disseminated. Overwhelmingly, the answer is no. First, FOIA offices do not have adequate resources to handle the volume of requests they get. Officers also report a lack of training and political interference. The new chief FOIA officers, intended to bring more accountability to the agency FOIA process, were described by one survey respondent as a "useless position filled by someone who is already wearing too many managerial hats."

Another major problem confronting the administration is the preservation of records. Record keeping laws are not keeping pace with technology. Electronic records seem to routinely become lost. For example, the Department of Justice was unable to locate many of torture memo author John Yoo's e-mails - were they deliberately deleted or just lost - it is difficult to know.

E-mails are probably some of the most important records for uncovering the truth. While surely, some are just junk - planning lunch or passing jokes, they can also include unguarded truths. Though we all know e-mails are forever and can come back to haunt us - we have Jack Abramoff as exhibit 1 - somehow, we generally still treat them like phone conversations and do not consider they may one day become public. As a result, a trove of information may be contained in these documents and one day, someone may uncover and view an e-mail from a top ranking Obama administration official with as much interest as we view Lincoln's letter to his general today.

First Amendment