To get out of the government any records government held as long as they were not damaging to National Security or law enforcement. Or personal privacy. Reluctant because everyone has federal agencies thought this was a nightmare. People can rummage through the files. We can do that. Moyers help the newspaper editors to marshal their argument about how we are in favor of open government. One of the fascinating things we found was that bill moyer had written a nice statement for president on the johnson where this legislation springs from our most essential principles that democracy works best when the people know what the government is doing. They must have access to the policy rules. Government officials should not have curtains of secrecy. We now know from lbjs own schedule that on the telephone, johnson called moyer and said cut that out. O xer have to has t through this declaration of freedom of information and then says this spring from one of our most essential principles, democracy works best when the people have all of the information that the security of the nation permits them to have. Big difference. It shows some of the reluctance. Lbj was the taskmaster of signing ceremonies, we have photographs of him sitting there with members of congress behind him where he crosses a t with one penn and then hands of another pen to them and then thought the eye and does another. I am in takes another pen. There was no signing ceremony for this and it does not appear on his daily schedule. All there are of these repeated phone calls from bill moyer. He admired from the american wired for had been the american psyche. The bill society. The bill came to president johnson and may not get signed. It might be pocket be dead. Vetoed. In the library, we found the response. Inadvertence is not our style. Dra lbj drag lbj. The middle three paragraphs are not about open government, they are about secrecy. This is about military secrets. This is about privacy and confidentiality. This is about the prerogatives of the president under the constitutions commanderinchief. Lbj says i do not share this concern. We do not want to do that. Thisiddle hole section of bill is about withholding information. Years has over 50 been amazing. The United States was the third country in the world to have a freedom of information act. Likeof the states wisconsin had always done their own freedom of information act. After the federal government, many other states joined in. Take the state of michigan. That the water crisis, the lead poisoning, those thousands of kids and put michigan, welint, know from their emails. They write to each other, we are not going to do this corrosion controls because it will cost too much. Wait until next year. They blame the community groups. It is a blame the victim thing. No was not. It was the city pipes. The transmission pipes. The only note that because the freedom of information request under michigan law by reporters from the Detroit Free Press and the Virginia Tech protester professor, from an angry housewife, from an epa scientist who did his own test. Days, the city switched back to detroit water. The rate of lead poisoning started to drop. There are a lot of heroes in this. Primo information was not the only sober bottle silver bullet. Information was not the only silver bullet. The freedom of information act is what help people accountable. Held peopleears accountable. That is 50 years later. There is a real history to this. The all idea old idea of access to records was under british common law where if you could show a personal interest in getting a hold of a courthouse record, you could get that only through judicial proceedings. Gradually, the real estate Title Insurance companies brought action after action at the state court level saying, courthouse records, we pay for them. They are taxpayer records. They should be open. At least create databases to check titles and make sure inheritances are created correct. They are the people that were the cuttingedge. Not journalists. It was not muckrakers or progresses. It was the real estate commercial interest who changed the state of the law from a need to know to a public right to know. Courthouse record, government record, got to be able to get that. In the 1930s with the new deal and the alphabet soup of federal ii, when theld war government turned into a permanent big National Security state. Standing army and huge expenditures. There was a push back. The Congress Passed the administrators procedure act. It said that the government will do something that will affect you or your family, you have a right to know in advance and an ability to comment on it. This is the notice and comment idea. It is what has given rise to him by mental impact statements. In the procedures act, there was a provision that was supposed to open up government records but it did not. In the 1950s, a crusading government democratic punishment was assigned congressman was assigned to a subcommittee and he tried to get information out of the eisenhower administration. They stonewalled him. Idea, we with this need a particular statute that says we have a right to know. There is some presumption of disclosure unless the government can show a real damage. Passedd never get that in the 50s. Into the 1950s, you have a democratic resident. Especially after lbjs landslide. A number of Republican Congress members who got interested in the idea as a way to rein in some of the president ial power. Moss picked up this bright, young illinois congressman as a cosponsor. Donald rumsfeld. Floor ofment on the the house is a pretty good explanation of why the bill became a real majority bill. Brumfield says government has gotten so big. Involved in some a different pieces of our lives. Medicare is pat. Social security. We need the right to get those records out of agencies to be able to uphold our own freedom. Brumfield signed up and thomas was ready. All the federal agencies had waited in and said this is a bad idea. Editors had not did it ounted ad an addict m campaign. They converted bill moyer. Johnson andary to thomas like this on Lyndon Johnson never had. Moyer became convinced and convinced his boss. If you because this you know this, every veto newspaper will editorialize you. People will read the accomplishment news clips. Compilation of news clips. Lbj with no ceremony and it was not chosen on july 4 for patriotic reasons. That just happen to be the last day before it pocket veto a pocket veto would kick in. We celebrated as a patriotic win. It was accident. It gave him a full year before they went into the mentation. It did not take effect until july 4, 1967. Then agencies figured out every kind of way to throw up obstacles. ,or example, the early law there was this National Security restriction. Ofncies, there is a body unclassified stuff, they would stick in a piece of classified information. They would use all these little tricks. They built and huge delays. They would even asked if members of congress. Stiff members of congress. A congresswoman was trying to get the wind patterns from the pacific and that Nuclear Tests would send wind that would touch parts of the hawaiian islands. She wanted the data on the wind blows of radioactivity. Flows of radioactivity. She brought a case under the freedom of information act. They do not her. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, the law does not specifically say that a court can overrule an agency. It will have to accept the agency claims. She lost. That was 1973. That led to a whole movement. Right at the moment of watergate, the vietnam war scandals, the beginnings of the cia scandals, impeachment of the congresson, developed a set of freedom of information amendments. Summary leaders on this were senator Teddy Kennedy or fill part of michigan or edwin muskie of maine. These amendments were meant to strengthen the 1966 bill by saying explicitly that courts can overrule agencies. They need to look at what is on the record. That there are restrictions on the ways that people like the fbi claim this will impinge investigations. This extra check and balance of the court which had not been there. Is amazing is under the freedom of information act, when a Teddy Kennedys staff people got the file years later of his negotiations with the fbi about the bill. They were writing amendments to make it work. In the file is a memo that the fbi liaison had written to her pills. The white house called us and told us to stop negotiating with Teddy Kennedy staff because they want this book to be as bad as possible so we can sustain a veto. No more amendments to make compromises with the fbis interest. Leave it as bad as possible. That is the bill that passed the congress. Gerald ford vetoed it. It is hard to figure out exactly if we had gotten all the documents, he clearly wanted to sign it. They wanted him to sign it. But all the agencies waiting waeihed in. Administration, the chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, it is hard to see their role but we do have notes of two meetings they held with president ford in the 10 days before he be to the bill. Bill. Oed the the focus was on leaks. This is what was on the top of fort head when he came to office. Fords head. Vetoed took office, he the bill. That is the bill. Congress overloaded the vetoed. That is the core of what we have today. It is why we can win. Is like the aclu can bring a lawsuit like this to force the continuous reviews. The final analysis on the last of the documents, and between the beginning of it and the end, we get document found. That is the core of it. A deadline of 20 working days. They hardly ever meet the deadline. If you have patience and persistence. It took 17 years to get the cia family jewels. Litigation, negotiating and finally getting that out. Getting human beings on the inside. Most people who work for the government our public servants. They are in there to do the right thing. If you can get one of those folks on the phone, talk to you about the request, you can often get responses. We were set up in the mid1980s when government secrecy was going through the roof on National Security. A lot of journalists and historians understood that a lot of what the government said was toret and did not stand up scrutiny of people got behind the black watches. Blotches. Massive overclassification. They all wanted to write their own memoirs and said most of what they did to be released. Could be released. These journalist and historian set us up to be that institutional memory to house the documents. There was not an internet. We created a library. Im sitting in now with all these brown boxes full of documents. Now we post them on the web and publish them for university libraries. We fire requests, we are research institute, we try to publish. We keep durations. And a lot of what the government in that regard, i want to show you this. This was one of the documents we got through the freedom of information act. A whole series of Henry Kissinger meetings with foreign leaders. This happened to be but they Turkish Foreign minister. With the Turkish Foreign minister. The turks say you need to ship us weapons so we can kill more greeks. Our Ambassador Says that is illegal. Kissinger says, before the freedom of information act, i used to say that the illegal we do it immediately. Unconstitutional takes a little longer. Ofn there are brackets laughter. Freedom of information act, im afraid to say things like this. This is also that deterrent effect of open government. The freedom of information act meet these people can do bad things in secret covered by National Security classification but we will find out. It may take years. This was 1975 and we did not get this until 2005. It, history get to judge it. We just had a conviction this past week of the federal court of the Chilean Army Officer who killed the biggest folksinger during the middle of the 1973 coup. He retired and moved to the states. Victims. Own by other there were some documents saying he was commander of this unit. They had eyewitness testimony. And grabbed him in florida he was just convicted. Time but its a long is worth it. Torture, youand can run, but you cant hide. One of the big stories nowadays is opioids. A lot of people hooked on oxycontin and other opiates. The government has been collecting all caps of data on how doctors prescribed these things. The tims case with rush baugh famous case with famous case with rush limbaugh. Journalist group filed this for the freedom of information act. The centers for medicare and medicaid had been collecting data for years but the American Medical Association did not want it out. They had to go through the freedom of information act to save the Public Interest value of this is so strong that you cannot show us an identifiable harm, you have to give it. So they got it. Every state agency for dr. Started coming to this database to check it was overprescribing. Who is outside the norm. What is the norm in a given area . Doctors say, am i out of line . The licensors can go after the doctors who were abusing the system. Learn how tot can change the pricing patterns and reimbursement patterns to put some limits on what has become a epidemic. An epidemic. They found some strange search terms. They wrote a big story about the. The number one search people are doing now doesnt seem to be coming from licensors. It seems to be coming from folks who want to know doctors who will prescribe anything. An ethical choice, do we take them with data because it is helping people find a doctor who will give them anything, no. We need to do some more reporting on this. Keep the data up and every place we are referring to connected to the centers for Disease Control damage sheets, side effects, warnings and use the data to keep doing what we have started which was bring down the opioid abuse. That is an incredible use of the freedom of information act. It challenges the power of a small group of physicians in this country who had been prescribing whatever they wanted to prescribed for many years with little more than professional ethics. Some other unknown stories to give you a sense of change of the debate of Climate Change is that for the freedom of information act weve been filing requests to look at all the negotiations over the last 30 years on Climate Change. Over the u. S. Positions. What were the foreign positions. What interest were. Who won the argument. We found that Ronald Reagan was really the hero back in 1987. Big split in the administration. The issue was the montreal protocol. Carbons banra chloroflourocarbons. Half of his administration said that would be a job killer. It was like what exactly like you could today about regulating thinkouse gases and any that would affect the climate. Maybe he was worried about their potential melanoma but he overruled the job killing objection and ordered the signing of the montreal protocol. Theyre interesting. The Washington Post reported on this and said, what a difference in the Republican Party between then and now. Spreads. Then we get after our specialty is the classified documents. How often do see a declassified document appear on latenight television . Dca declassified document appear on latenight alevision do you see declassified document appear on latenight television . Colbert with rumsfeld. The danger of weapons of mass destruction. Secret, we now have it through the freedom of information act, rumsfeld is saying please take a look at this material as to what we dont know about weapons of mass destruction. It is big. A real contrast. Insidepr face versus what we dont know. That is really important for public to know about the disaster in iraq and their own decisionmaking. Rumsfeld squirms in the chair. The president had available to him intelligence of all elements of the government. The National SecurityCouncil Members have that information. It was all shared. It is never certain that if it were a fact, it would not be called intelligence. Wow. [laughter] i think you answered my question. [laughter] this is because of the freedom of information. This is called the snowflake. Rumsfeld was famous when he was secretary of defense for managing the department by sending these one line or two line memos to subordinates. This is the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Rumsfeldo work for called the snowflakes. Some days there would be a blizzard of them. Knew what to do. Do you spend the next day answering the snowflake . Sometimes the snowflake just melted and was never heard from again. In this case, my bet is it melted away. They decided to invade iraq and no one was interested in looking at what we did not know. The absence of evidence was the absence of evidence. How did they get made. . How did they control the information . Who decided . We knew from some of the memoirs , we never had a debate. There was no debate about taking a rack. It was understood invading iraq. It was understood that the president intended to invade. Back and look back at some of the key dates. In this case, we knew the type of document, we knew that copies of it were in the executive secretarys office. With some precision, we could by in any snowflakes written secretary rumsfeld in august of september 2002. Then you can come up with some good ones. That help us track that. About oneision, what president bush met with tony r . Ll they are blai talking about what different ,reedom of information makes starting that the 9 11, we now know a lot with investigations and lawsuits and hearings. Askingedit to the aclu for all documents about our torture programs or suspected al qaeda terrorists we grabbed. The first time around, even with a federal judge ordering the government to review the documents, the version of the documents that they got was this one. This is a page out of the cia inspector generals own investigation of the torture program. Headlineave is the enhanced inter