Public has right to information

Every day, the federal government releases vast amounts of useful information about every aspect of our nation and how government works.

This public information has a deep impact on almost every aspect of American life. Some of it can be used to hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, or have a profound effect on health, economic development and commerce.

The problem is, much of this government information is too often hard to find, difficult to understand, expensive to obtain in useful formats, and available in only a few locations.

There is a solution to this problem: the Internet.

Because of this revolutionary medium, we now have new expectations about our ability to access information, including information about the work of government.

The Internet enables us to obtain a myriad of information 24 hours a day, seven days a week — from our latest credit card transactions to local traffic reports to the most recent college basketball rankings.

But if we want information about our federal government — information often required by law to be made available to the public — we often must resort to filing a formal request and waiting for weeks or even months for a response.

This is why the Sunlight Foundation is working to inform a legislative initiative that will be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to require that all public government-held information be available online.

Government information cannot be considered public if, to access it, one must travel to Washington and view it in the basement office of a government building, open only on weekdays from 9 to 5.

A new paradigm must emerge that shifts the burden from the public to request information from the government using the Freedom of Information Act to the government to disclose the information proactively.

Gabriela Schneider is communications director for The Sunlight Foundation in Washington D.C. Contact her at: gschneider@sunlightfoundation.com