It does not matter how good the law is if there is no way to know whether the law is being followed. One of the strongest tools we have for learning about whether the government is following the law is the Freedom of Information Act, which allows anyone to write to a federal government body and ask for almost any records (states have their own versions of these laws; Maine’s is called the Freedom of Access Act). The Freedom of Information Act, known to its friends as FOIA, was passed in the wake of Watergate, after Congress and the public learned just how far the Executive branch was capable of straying from legal behavior.
Since 2003, lawyers at the ACLU have been engaged in the most significant FOIA requests and litigation in the law’s history, and this weekend the New York Times gave them, and their case, some well-deserved attention. The case involves U.S. policy on detainees—who is being held; where are they kept; and how are they treated. The article only touches on some of the substance of the disclosures. For more, you can consult the reporting in Salon and the New Yorker, as well as the book-length collection of documents published two years ago. But the Times piece provides a solid human angle on what goes into a case of this magnitude. In particular, I love the detail about the senior lawyer who jokingly offer to pay a dollar for every page the government turned over. So far, the total is approximately 130,000 pages.
