The Freedom of Information Act turns 41

Yesterday, on the 4th of July, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) turned 41 years old.

On tha occation, Wired had an online article about the act

Bittersweet Sunshine: Four Decades of FOIA Wins and Losses

U.S. government documents used to be considered secret unless individual agencies decided to release them.

But on July 4, 1966, that presumption was inverted when the Freedom of Information Act was signed into law, declaring that in a government of, by and for the people, government records must be released to the public upon request, unless those records meet a handful of defined exemptions.

Over the last four decades, FOIA (pronounced "foy-ya") has become one of the most important laws creating openness and transparency in government. It's a key tool for journalists and nonprofit groups investigating the workings of the federal government.

It has been used to reveal the FBI's Vietnam-era surveillance of American dissidents, CIA drug experiments on American citizens, and government inspectors turning a blind eye to the sale of contaminated meat, among many other things.

But as a just-released report from the National Security Archive showed, bureaucracies still resist the law's openness imperative. They will ignore requests, take decades to process them or redact embarrassing information. A bill that would penalize agencies for foot-dragging was set to be voted on earlier this year by the full Senate, but was stalled by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), who put a secret hold on the bill. There will be no progress until he removes the hold.

Despite these obstacles, persistent reporters and public-interest organizations have been able to crack the veil of secrecy that bureaucrats and politicians use to hide their motivations and machinations.

In honor of the law's 41st birthday, Wired News presents five of the best technology-focused FOIA wins and five that are still outstanding.

Openness and transparency is important to create true democracies, and avoid nepotism, corruption and outright power abuse. Go read the cases that Wired included.

One of the outstanding cases, Warrantless Wiretapping Documents, might get closer to and end though. Electronic Frontier Foundation sends out a newsmail about what is happening on the electronic freedom front, and the latest mail included the following:

It's Official: Senate Committee Issues Subpoenas for Key
NSA Spying Docs

After voting to authorize subpoenas for information on the
NSA spying program last week, the Senate Judiciary
Committee has now officially issued them.

Read the rest of it here

Note: This is a repost of an earlier post, in which someone had left some nasty spam-javascript in the comments. A comment I couldn't delete for some reason. If this happens again, I guess I will have to turn comment moderation on. *sigh*

Corruption and wealth

Over at A Fistful of Euros, Doug Muir wrote about the newest corruption perception index numbers from Transparency International. As Doug points out, the numbers are perceptive, and not necessarily a real picture of the level of corruption in the country.

Doug also wrote the following:

You know what I’d love to see? I’d love to see some scattergraphs correlating these scores with things like PPP GDP per capita. You’d see a cloud of dots around a rough diagonal line, with scores tending to rise with income. But there’d be interesting outliers on either side.

Someone of course went ahead and did it, and put the result up on the web. As people can see, there is a fairly strong correlation between the CPI and GDP per capita.

I couldn't help wonder if there would be any correlation with the GINI coefficient and the CPI. Intuitively, it would seem logical, but we all know that intuition often is wrong.
So, I did some number crunching, looking at the CPI, GDP per capita, and the GINI coefficient. As the CIA factbook doesn't have the GINI coefficient for a number of countries (including most Arabic countries), the results are of course more limited than the straight CPI/GDP per capita comparison. However, I did find some interesting results.

There is apparently absolutely no correlation between the GINI coefficient and the CPI score.


As I said, intuitively it would seem that there would be some kind of correlation, but it doesn't seem to be the case if you go but the numbers. Countries with high CPI numbers (i.e. countries that are less corrupt) tend to have lower GINI scores that other countries, but Singapore (4th highest CPI) stands out among the top ten.

As Doug said, there were some outliers when you look at the CPI and the GDP per capita (PPP). First I looked at PPP sorted by CPI (again only with countries that I had the GINI score for).

In the bottom end of the CPI scale, Belarus is an outlier - not really surprising, as is Turkmenistan.
Russia stands out as the one country in the lower half with a PPP of more than $10,000. Jordan is a huge out lier, with the highest CPI of any country with a PPP below $5,000. Chile is also noteworthy by having the same CPI as the US though the difference in PPP is $30,900 (Chile: $12,600, USA: $43,500).

I also looked at the CPI sorted by PPP.


Here the noteworthy exception is New Zealand, and to some degree Italy, the US and Ireland - all in the high end. The rest of the abnormalities were uncovered by the other graph.