information no longer power

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Forwarded by Seth Johnson

http://www.latimes.com/la-ed-info8nov08,0,7711960.story

Los Angeles Times
November 8, 2002

EDITORIAL
Chokehold on Knowledge

Since it's the threat of obscurantism we're hoping to
thwart, let's be blunt: The Bush administration's plan to
strip the Government Printing Office's authority is a threat
to democracy. 

Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels wants
to transfer control of information management from the
printing office to individual Cabinet agencies. That would
spell the end of the current system, in place since the
Jeffersonian era, which requires executive branch agencies
to send their documents and reports to neutral librarians,
who then make them available to the public both online and
in 1,300 public reading rooms nationwide.

Daniels would replace that system with a more secretive one
in which individual agencies would manage -- and possibly
sanitize -- their own electronic databases.

Currently, a federal agency such as the Pentagon can't
delete an embarrassing passage from a historical document
without first going through the hassle of asking each
reading room to obscure the passage with a black marker.

If Daniels gets his way, all an agency will have to do is
call up the document in Microsoft Word and quietly hit
Control X to delete the passage for eternity.

Daniels says he's only trying to save taxpayer money. Giving
Cabinet-level agencies the ability to select printing
services on the basis of "quality, cost and time of
delivery," he wrote, could save up to $70 million a year.
That's a dubious claim, however, because the printing office
already sends nearly two-thirds of its work to the private
contractor with the lowest bid.

As library experts have recently pointed out, privatization
might or might not save money, but it certainly would
diminish the public's access to information needed to make
informed decisions.

As Barbara Quint, Information Today's usually dispassionate
columnist, fumed in September, Daniel's current push
"threatens to gut federal document dissemination -- and
fast." 

In his 1644 pamphlet "Areopagitica," the English poet John
Milton (reacting to how the Catholic Church had arrested and
silenced Galileo simply because the astronomer's views on
the universe conflicted with its doctrines) warned that
citizens who didn't know what their government was doing
couldn't hold it accountable.

In the late 18th century the words of an American lawyer,
Patrick Henry, helped persuade Congress to pass legislation
protecting the public's right to know. "The liberties of a
people never were, nor ever will be, secure," Henry said,
"when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from
them." 

In deciding whether to keep the library system that works to
keep executive branch agencies honest, Congress has a
choice: trust the upstarts in the Bush administration or
heed the wisdom that has guided the country for more than
two centuries. 

Copyright 2002 Los Angeles Times



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