Open Records Should be the Real Life Default. Time to Revamp FOIA

Elon Musk:

I think the strong bias with respect to government information should be to make it available to the public, like it should be, as transparent as possible. Fully transparent, unless it’s a massive risk to the country, you know, we don’t want to give, say, exact instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb or something like that. But unless there’s a genuine risk to the country, all information in the government should be public.

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Anyone who has dealt with FOIA knows how readily the U.S. government obstructs the production of government information. Therefore, I completely agree with Musk. All government information should be presumptively open and available online, with only necessary and compelling exceptions. This includes all government efforts to censor Americans, either directly or through U.S. security state cutouts. Government are our employees who work for us. We the People are their bosses.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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