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Guest Editorial: Public suffers from government secrecy

Across America this week, newspapers, radio and TV stations, magazines, libraries, and web-based journals are speaking out against government secrecy in a campaign called national Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know. They hope to initiate a public dialogue about the importance of access to government information.

As passionate as we in the media feel about this subject, it's not about journalists who want to write a good story and sell newspapers. It's about you and your ability to be a good citizen in our democracy. As a citizen, you have a job. You take all the information available to you, analyze it in the context of your values, and make decisions about how you wish to be governed.

Open government and access to the information it holds is a basic requirement for a healthy democracy. It allows taxpayers to see where their money goes and it ensures government accountability. As Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline said recently, "Accountability is the cornerstone of representative government and transparency is the cornerstone of accountability."

Unfortunately, since 9/11 an alarming amount of public information is being kept secret from citizens and the problem is increasing by the month. Access to information has been weakened while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded.

Some of these changes have been necessary. We must effectively deal with the threats confronting our nation, but we must do so without excess secrecy and surveillance that impairs our democratic institutions. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said so well, albeit long before 9/11: "Freedom of access to data about government is so vital that only the national security, not the desire of public officials or private citizens, should determine when it must be withheld or restricted."

Ultimately, excessive secrecy will undermine the public's confidence in our government and its essential institutions. We need to stick to our constitutional principles, perhaps especially when they are contrary to instinct.

An unfettered flow of information is the oxygen that allows our democracy to breathe. Our founding father James Madison perhaps put it the most eloquently: "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. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

The Kansas legislature is considering a number of important initiatives in support of open government, including a proposal for Kansas to join five other states making open government a constitutional right. For your own sake as a citizen, you should support them.

— Edward Seaton, Manhattan Mercury

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