Investigation or personal privacy. Becauseas reluctant everyone of his federal agencies thought this was a nightmare. You mean people are going to be rummaging through our files . We cant do that. Thebill moyers helped newspaper editors especially to marshall their argument about how we really are in favor of open government. One of the fascinating things we found was bill moyers had written a nice signing statement where hedent johnson had this ringing language that this registration spring from our most essential principles. Democracy works best when people knows what their government is doing. They must have access to policy and rules. Good government functions best in the full light of day. What is great about that is we now know from l. B. J. s own daily schedule that on the telephone johnson called moyers and said cut that out. Thiss have to x through ringing declaration about freedom of information and puts in the final version that this legislation springs from one of our most essential principles. When theacy works best people have all the information the security of the nation permits them to have. Big difference. It is really interesting. That shows some of the real reluctance. L. B. J. Was the taskmaster assigning ceremonies. We have photographs of him sitting there with members of congress behind him where he pen anda t with one dots an i with another pen and hands it back. With stage master for ceremony he was stage master for ceremony. Not only was there no signings are money for the freedom of information act, it does not even appear on his daily schedule at the l. B. J. Library. All there are repeated phone calls from bill moyers. He had been wired from the society of news editors. The editors had written him on july 2. This bill just came to president johnson, it might not get signed by inadvertence. In the l. B. J. Library, we found inadvertencese not our style. He still had to drag l. B. J. With major edits in the final signing statement. It is his stork july 4, 1966. The middle three paragraphs are not about open government. They are about secrecy. This one is about military secrets. This one is about privacy and confidentiality of durations. This is about prerogatives of the president. L. B. J. Says i do not share this concern. We dont want to do that. The middle section of the signing statement of this historic bill is about withholding information. But the impact over 50 years has been amazing. The United States was the third country in the world to have a freedom of information act, after sweden and finland. Some of the states like wisconsin had already done their own freedom of information acts. After the federal government passed theirs in 1966, many other states joined in. Take michigan for example. We know today that the water crisis, the lead poisoning of thousands of kids in flint is because state officials this is from their own emails released through the state freedom of information act they write we will not do the corrosion. They blame the Community Groups riling people up. There was a blame the victim thing. Is the old pipes in your house. It was the city pipes. We know that because freedom of information request under professor,w, from a an investigator from the aclu, and angry housewife, and e. P. A. Scientist who did his own test who showed it was not the pipes in the house. When these emails came out, within five days the city switched back to detroit water in the rates of lead poisoning started to drop. There are lots of heroes. Threemonth information was not the only clue, the only silver bullet. Levels of lead obtained by pediatricians. Scientists tested the pipes. For the freedom of information act is what help people accountable. That is 50 years later making a difference, saving kids from lead poisoning. That is the effect of the freedom of information act. There is real history to this because the old idea of access to records was under british common law where if you could show a personal interest, economic interest, family interest, in getting hold of a courthouse record, you could get that. But only through some judicial proceeding. There was no right to know. Gradually in the 1800s in this country, the real estate Title Insurance companies brought actions of the state court level saying courthouse records. We pay for them. They are taxpayer records. They should be open. They wanted to check titles so they could issue Insurance Bonds on those titles. But they are the people that were the cutting edge. Not journalists. Interesting. It was the real estate commercial interest who changed the state of the law from a need to know, if you have a need to know you might get access, to a public right to know. If it is a courthouse record, you ought to be able to get it. In the 1930s with the new deal and growth of federal agencies, we had the First Federal register in the 1930s and national archives. In world war ii when our government turned into a permanent, Big National Security state with a Standing Army and huge expenditures on government, there was a real push back. Congress called it the administrative procedures act. Its as if the government is going to do something that affects you your business or family, have a right to know in advance and ability to comment on it before it is finalized. This is the notice and comment idea. It is what has given rise to Environmental Impact statements and things like that. In that procedures are, there was a provision that was supposed to open up government records but it did not. In the 1950s, a crusading democratic congressman from someornia was assigned to podunk committee and he tried to get information out of the eisenhower administration. They stonewalled him. He came up with this idea. Maybe we need a particular statute that we have a right to know. There is some presumption of disclosure unless the government can show real damage in releasing the document, we should be able to get it. He never could get that passed in the 1950s. There was a republican president and a lot of pushback. In the 1960s, you have a democratic president. Especially after Lyndon Johnsons landslide in 1964, we had a number of republican members of congress who got interested in this idea is a way to rein in some president ial power. John moss, the lonely crusader all this time, pick this bright illinois congressman as a cosponsor. A guy named Donald Rumsfeld. His statement on the floor is a good explanation of why the bill became a majority bill. Rumsfeld said government has gotten so big. It is involved in so many pieces of our lives. Medicare is passed, Social Security and so forth. We need the right to get those records out of agencies to be able to uphold our own liberty and freedom and as a restraint on government. So rumsfeld signed up and john moss was ready. Now all the federal agencies had weighed in saying this was a bad idea. But the news editors had mounted a major Editorial Campaign and turned it into is johnson going to be secretive or is he going to stand for open government . And they converted bill moyers. Very influential. He was the press secretary to johnson, almost like a son Lyndon Johnson never had. And lawyers became convinced and moyersced and became convinced and commenced his boss if you turn this down every editor will be against you. The first batch of information everybody in the white house reads is the compilation of news clips. Now it is digital and president obama gets it on an ipad. In those days, it was a stack of xeroxed copies. Sensitivity to the press. L. B. J. With no sermon he unwillingly with no ceremony, unwillingly. 4 was not chosen on july because of patriotic reasons. It was by happenstance. We now celebrate it as a patriotic win but it was accident. The bill gave them a full year before they went into implementation, so it did not take effect until july 4, 1967. And then agencies figured out every kind of way to throw obstacles. Law,xample in the early there was this National Security restriction you saw in l. B. J. s final signing statement. What agencies would do it is if there was a body of unclassified stuff, they would stick something classified in, contamination technique. They would use all of these little tricks. They built in huge delays. They would even stiff members of congress. A congresswoman who represented hawaii was trying to get information about the wind patterns in the pacific are such that our Nuclear Tests would send wind that could touch part of the hawaiian islands. She represented hawaii so she wanted the data on the wind flows of radioactivity from our Nuclear Tests. The government said you cant have them. She said i am a member of congress. They said you cant have them. She brought a case under the freedom of information act. They denied hurt. It went to the supreme court. The laweme court says does not specifically say a court can overrule an agency. They have to accept the agency claims. And she lost. That was in 1973. That led to a movement that happened at the moment of watergate, the vietnam war scandals, the beginnings of the c. I. A. Scandals, impeachment of president nixon, his resignation. You had congress developed a series of amendments. Some real leaders were senator ted kennedy and fell apart of michigan fell apart philip hart of michigan. It was meant to strengthen the can bill saying the courts overrule agencies. They need to look at just what is on the record. That there were restrictions on the ways people like the f. B. I. Can claim this will impinge on investigation. Even on National Security office extra check and balance of the court which had not been there the first time around. What is amazing is under the freedom of information act one of Teddy Kennedys staff people got this file years later of his negotiations with the f. B. I. About the bill because they were riding amendments to try to make it work. In the file was a memo the f. B. I. Legislative liaison had written to her peers. The white house told us to stop negotiating with Teddy Kennedys staff because they want the bill to be as bad as possible so we can sustain a beater. In other words, no more amendments to make compromise is with the f. B. I. Interests. Leave it as bad as possible. That is the bill that passed congress. Resident ford vetoed it his chief of staff was Donald Rumsfeld who cosponsored the 1966 bill. We have gotten all before library documents. Hearly wanted to sign it clearly wanted to sign it. But all of the agencies weighed in. Called the c. I. A. And said the president might sign this and this would be bad for you. We can show the c. I. A. Is lobbying. Inside the administration, the chief of staff was rumsfeld and the deputy chief of staff was cheney. Is hard to see their role but we have notes of meetings they held with president ford in the 10 days before he vetoed the bill and the meetings were all about the problem of leaks. He put rumsfeld in charge of a Plumbers Group on how to shut it down. This is what is in the top of president fords had even though when he comes into office he vows that he will not repeat what Richard Nixon did. We will have an open administration. He the press into watching toast in most muffins in the white house residence. But then they vetoed the bill. Unfortunately for him, the congressman overrode the vetoes. That is the bill that is the core of what we have today. That is why we can win. That is why the aclu can get a judge to force the continuous reviews. Final analysis on the last of the documents, the courts will always rule in the governments favor. But between the beginning and end, they get documents out. That is the core of it. Is a deadline. Now it is 20 days for the government to respond. If you have patience and persistence. They took 17 years to get the c. I. A. Family jewels. Appeals, threatening litigation, negotiation, getting human beings on the inside. Most people who work for the government are public servants. They are in there to try to do the right thing. If you can get one of them on the phone and talk them about your request, you can often get a response. We were set up in the mid1980s when government secrecy was going through the roof on National Security grounds. A lot of journalists and historians understood a lot of what the government did was secret. It did not really stand up to scrutiny people got behind the black blotches. May be 70 of massive overclassification. Anytime you interview a former official, they want to write their own memoirs. They will tell you most of what i saw can be released within a short time. These journalists and historians set us up to be that kind of institutional memory, to house the documents when they came in because back then there was not an internet. We created an actual library. I am sitting in it with all these brown boxes full of documents released through the freedom of information act. Now we post them on the web and publish them for university libraries. We file requests. We institutional memory, a research institute. We try to publish. We do generation generation curation. We are trying to get policy documents were a decision could have gone one way or the other that we can learn from. Not just for history but for future better policy. In that regard, one of my favorites. This was one of the documents we got through the freedom of information act with a series of Henry Kissingers meetings with foreign leaders. This was 1975. It is fascinating because the turks say you need to ship us some weapons so we can kill more greeks in cyprus. Our Ambassador Says that is illegal. Kissinger jumps in and says before the freedom of information act ice to say the illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer. There is a bracket here of laughter. He goes on to say that since the freedom of information act, im afraid to Say Something like that. The freedom of information act being in place means these guys can go and do bad things in secret covered by National Security classification, that we are going to find out. It may take years. This is 1975. We did not get this until 2005. It could take decades. But when you publish it, history gets to judge it. We just had a conviction this of aweek in federal court Chilean Army Officer killed their biggest folksinger during the middle of the 1973 coup. He retired, moved to the states, worked as a cook, tracked down by other victims of his death squad. There were documents showing he was commander of this particular unit at this particular stadium. They had eyewitness testimony. They grabbed him in florida and sued. He was just convicted the other day. Justice takes a long time. But it is worth it. Every murderer, torture, death squad around the world. You can run, but you cant hide when there is the freedom of information act after you. One of the big stories nowadays in the United States is the opioid epidemic. A lot of people hooked on oxycontin and other opiates. The government has been collecting all kinds of data on how doctors prescribe these things. You know the famous case where Rush Limbaugh was caught sending his secretary out to get his oxycontin prescription. Filedreat nonprofit under the freedom of action information act on the practice of opioids. The centers for medicaid and medicare had been collecting the data for years but the American Medical Association did not want it out. Propublica i to go through the freedom had to go through the freedom of information act saying you cannot show i did file identifiable harm so they gave it. All of a sudden, every state started coming to this database to check who is overprescribing. Areais the norm in a given for a prescription of opioid . The good doctors say am i out of line . The licensors could go after the doctors who were abusing the system. The government itself could learn by the reporting and coverage how to change the pricing patterns and reimbursement patterns for opioids to put limits on what had become an epidemic. Isla vista or because i love this story because in the last year they found strange search terms in their database. They wrote a big story about it. They said the number one search people are doing in our database does not seem to be coming from licensors. It seems to be coming from folks who want to know doctors who will prescribe anything. They faced an ethical choice. Do we take down this data because it is helping people find a doctor that give them anything . They said we need to do more reporting on this, keep the data up, and every place we are referring to any of the opioids, connected to the centers for Disease Control damage sheets, the warnings about it. And use the data to keep doing what we started which was to bring down the rate of opioid abuse. That is incredible use of the freedom of information act. That affects hundreds of thousands of people. Challenges the power of a small group of physicians in this country who had been prescribing whatever they wanted for many years. This puts another check and balance on that power. I think for the public health. Some other unknown stories to give you a sense of the change even in the great debate about Climate Change is that through the freedom of information act we have been filing requests to look at all the negotiations over the last 30 or 40 years on Climate Change. The u. S. Positions, the foreign positions, what interests were served. We found Ronald Reagan was really the hero back in 1987. A big split in his administration. The issue was the montreal protocol which band the whole chlorofluorocarbons. Thatottle that had those were known to destroy the ozone , half of reagans administration said that would be a job killer. Youas language exactly like here today about regulating greenhouse gases, about any kind of change in industrial or energy use to protect the climate. Back then, i dont know. Maybe it was his hollywood friends who had deep suntans and he was worried about their potential melanoma or what it was exactly, but reagan overruled the job killing objection and ordered the signing and negotiated the signing of the natural protocols montreal protocols. Very interesting. Washington post when it reported on the documents said what a difference in the Republican Party between then and now on Climate Change. It is interesting. Our we get after specialty is classified documents. This is one of my favorites. How often do you see a declassified document appear on latenight television . Theres usually not much funny. Here you have Stephen Colbert grilling Donald Rumsfeld earlier this year because in 2002 when rumsfeld and others in the Bush Administration were screaming about mushroom clouds coming at us and the danger of weapons of mass destruction, inside in secret we now have it through the freedom of information act rumsfeld is writing to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff saying please look at this material as what we dont know about weapons of mass destruction. It is big. In real contrast a real contrast. The public be our face versus inside what we dont know. That is really important for the public to know about the disaster in iraq and their own decisionmaking. Fascinating clip. Rumsfeld squirms a bit in the chair. [video clip] the president had available to him intelligence from all elements of the government. The National SecurityCouncil Members had that information. It was all shared. It was also applied. It is never certain. If it were if it were a fact, it would not be called intelligence. Wow. [laughter] i think you answered my question. [laughter] mr. Blanton this is a tribute to freedom of information act. Wasfeld was famous for he secretary of defense for managing the department by sending these little one or twoline memos to subordinates. This is not too far down. It is the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. People who worked for rumsfeld called these snowflakes. Some days there would be a blizzard. Do you spend the next day answering this snowflake . Sometimes you did. Then you went back and rumsfeld was glad to hear. Sometimes the snowflake just melted away and was not heard from again. In this case, i bet it melted away. Nobody was interested in looking at what we dont know. It turns out what we dont know was the absence of evidence, the evidence of absence. A whole project looking at the iraq war decisions, how they got made, how did they control the information flow, who actually decided. , henew from some memoirs said we never had a debate. There was no debate about invading iraq. Was just understood from a very early time the president intended to invade. But there was never a formal discussion about it. So we went back and looked at key dates. This was 2002. The main briefing of the war plan was 2002. We were really interested in that in particular. In this case, we knew a particular type of document. We knew copies of it were in the executive secretarys office at the department of defense so we could with some precision put in, we would like any snowflakes written by secretary rumsfeld in august and september of 2002. And then you can come up with some pretty good answers. That helped us trackback. President bush meets with tony blair, the british Prime Minister in march . Lets ask for some of those. Then you can follow it up. The more precise, the better. Talk about what difference freedom of information act makes we nowing after 9 11 know a lot because of investigations and lawsuits and Senate Intelligence committee hearings. Give real credit to the aclu who brought a big case in new york asking for all documents about our detention and torture program for suspected al qaeda out ofsts we grabbed yemen, pakistan, afghanistan, or wherever. The first time around in court, the federal judge ordering the government to review the document. The version of the document the aclu got was this one. This is a page out of the c. I. A. Inspector generals own investigation of the torture program. Of you have is the headline enhanced interrogation techniques at the top. Called thepage 15 waterboarding technique. This is all the government would release of this page as of 2008. 2009, a new president came in. They are faced with the whole torture program. They have to make a series of policy decisions. They look at the documents and say we are against torture. We are going to end this program. President obama said on the campaign trail he would end it with an executive order. Does an executive order to end it and the Obama Administration releases this listing all the enhanced interrogation techniques. Sleep deprivation for days and days at a time, forcing people to stay in cold cells with no clothing, being confined in boxes where you could introduce out, the to freak them face slap to show domination by the interrogator. All these things under the International Conventions are torture and they were on the approved list of enhanced interrogation techniques. It is one of the great euphemisms government often comes up with. It just means torture. Now we know. The aclu kind of lost their lawsuit the first time around but kept at it. Under the freedom of information act, under a new administration, they said we dont do this anymore. We prohibited these techniques. We cant classify anymore. Lets release them. Here you are. It makes it more likely will not resume, although they are still sitting in a bottom drawer at the c. I. A. For another terrorist attack or threat. You go back down to the dark well and pull these out. Put now we know a lot more about it. This is one of the great scientific successes of our time. You can see all the reductions. These are white. I think they did not want the black. A little too visual. This is like swiss cheese. On viewsmemorandum on trained cats for use. The c. I. A. Invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in testing whether you could wire a cat, surgically implant microphones, to use them as surveillance instruments. If you had a soviet diplomat across from the white house, send a cat over around his legs and pick up whatever hes saying to whatever agencies. May describe it they describe it as a remarkable Scientific Achievement but would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs. This is bureaucratic language. What actually happened is they surgically implanted the mics, wires. Transmissions worked. The first field test, they let the cat out. It is run over by a taxi. Shucks. Well, cats can be trained to move short distances. Maybe we can train them to go to the park bench. But the security factors in using this in a real situation for our purposes would not be practical. No kidding. [laughter] what if the cat gets distracted by a mouse gets run over . Released through the freedom of information act. C. I. A. Did not want to release it because they said this is sources and methods, damaging to National Security, so we only got it on appeal. It made news around the world. Goes to the point that we often run into the claim is classified on National Security grounds. The real reason it is held withheld his embarrassment. Ar law today has created nextdoor neighbor flow of documents you see from these examples i have shown you. In 1966, we were one of the few after the fallld of the berlin wall, every one of the new democracies wanted a freedom of information law. We had hungarian dissidents in the National Security archive asking how you get that stuff, we have to get his communist party file released. We helped a lot of folks around w freedom ofght ne information laws. Now there are 110 countries with freedom of information laws of one kind or the other. Some of them are like we will check this box to be part of the international community. Some of them are much better than our law. A good example. Think about mexico. We think about a broken judicial system, Police Forces in bed with the drug gangs, a level of routine violence you would not want to experience, government plagued with corruption. And yet, their freedom of information law is not only rated higher than ours but produces real results that in our system we could not get. A great example is a famous case a year ago. 43 disappeared students. The government blamed it on a drug gang. It turned out the local police were in cahoots with the drug game so they link those guys. The families went looking for information because the story did not fit. They brought in legal experts predict they took a look and said Something Else is going on. A group of those human rights organizations, with help from us, file the case with the information tribunal in mexico. Something our law does not have. Our law does not have an office that can overrule agencies. It does not have a tribunal that has legal power to say to an agency you got to release this because their argument is right. In mexico, the tribunal overruled the federal attorney general and forced him to release the investigative file that showed what the International Critics said was right. There had been a federal police role in squashing the disappearing of the students. Not just local police and the drug gang. Investigation is continuing. In mexico, they got it released through a stronger law. We would not have been able to get that investigative island this country file in this country. There are examples like that in india where there is an investigative commissioner in every state who regularly intervenes and overrules. Pieces of the American Freedom of information act are kind of the next agenda for the 60th anniversary maybe where we really need an omnibus with power. We had a mediating Office Congress created in 2007. They are kind of like a divorce mediator. They cannot sit at the top of the courtroom and bang the gavel and say youre being outrageous. They can get on the phone and say be nice. Sometimes that works and it prevents litigation. It is a useful thing but has no power. To power electing mexican, chilean not power like the mexican, chilean, or indian commissions have. We have to do that and build in more of the Public Interest omnibus. You had a gross violation of human rights with the disappearing of students. That overrides the attorney general confidentiality because that is more important. We dont have that kind of balance in our system. Even in a case like the torture case, that took a change of policy by the Administration Rather than an application of the human rights override. If we could do those things, have a real tribunal that can overrule bad decisions by agencies and have a real Public Interest human rights balancing test, we would move up. I think right now, this is a page out of one of the international takings rankings. We are ranked 104 out of 209. We are between indonesia and trinidad and tobago. And way behind mexico, india, chile, and countries like that. So we have work to do. At the 50th anniversary, we have a lot to be thankful for. What it should also be a wakeup call. We have to make our bill better. Used to be the world leader. We can be again. I give credit to senators who have been leaders on this. At from 2006 to the present, you will not find that many truly bipartisan bills. But a number of them are called leahy cornyn and they are on open government. When we had an audit that showed agencies were not paying attention to the mediating office, we had audits showing reports from agencies about their performance were wrong, hy did a billa that tried to give the office and power to force agencies to tell the truth. In the last five years, we have been able to show through audits agencies were not updating regulations on freedom of information. President obama had done a whole memo saying we have a presumption of disclosure. More than half the agencies never even recognized that. Think what that cornyn and leahy most upset is more than half of the agencies did not change regulations when they passed the bill in 2007. More than half of the regulations did not mention the mediating office. ,ornyn and leahy and grassley on the house side some real champions, one of the few bipartisan bills with elijah cummins, darrell issa, and the new chair of utah. There is a bill that would do some of the same things. Make them update regulations. Filled in this presumption of disclosure into the statute so the courts could look at it. It is a step toward the Public Interest balancing test. Set some deadlines. Give this mediating office t power to report directly to conversation is them independence from agencies and sets a sunset on a provision that has been abused by agencies which says we have to have a zone of confidential discussion to get anything done. Extended. Claimed that 40 or 50 years. How would that chill todays discussions . The court says the law does not put any deadline on it. This newbill does just passed by congress. President obama says he will sign it. The last day he has to sign it is july 4, 2016. I dont know if the white house will want to have a signing ceremony either. [laughter] it has taken eight years for them to get into the law something the president promised on day one. Ofsident obama the freedom information act is one of the key ways in which citizens are able to find out what is going on in government. The good news is over the course of my presidency, we have requests more foia than ever before. And we have worked to make it easier and more transparent, putting more stuff online. But having said all of that, we are actually getting many more requests for foia than ever before. And so, we have had to figure out ways we can reform this to make it easier, faster, cheaper for people to get the information they want. Fortunately, congress on a bipartisan basis has provided the tools through legislation to codify some of the reforms we have already made and expand more of these reforms so government is more responsive. I am very proud of all the work we have done to try to make government more open and responsive. I know people have not always been satisfied with the speed with which they are getting responses and requests. Hopefully, this is going to help. It will be an Important Initiative for us to continue on the reform path, so im going to sign that right now. Blanton my hope is people on this 50th birthday will say it is good we have the opioid and torture documents that came out. It is good we know the Parmesan Cheese being sold by target actually does not have any parmesan in it and has 12 wood chips. We only know this from a freedom by the fdaion act that have done a spot check. Ated,of it might be gre parmesan and we know that because of the freedom of information act. Power features include lectures in history. Visit College Classrooms across the country to hear lectures by top history professors. American artifacts takes a look at treasures. Reel america revealing the 20th century through newsreel. You hear about people who shaped the civil war and reconstruction. Y focuses onc president s and first ladies. American history tv every weekend on cspan3. Cspan is in denver learning more about the citys rich history. The mile high city was built on the boom and bust of the silver industry. More aboutto learn the silver crash of 1893. The gold rush begins in 1859 in the denver area where gold was first discovered. But silver mining really hit its heyday in the 1880s, late 1870s, and really the 1880s was the boom time. B sherman silver act was passed and that insured the federal