Your ability to access information is not the most exciting topic Connecticut legislators will discuss in the waning weeks of this session, but for a moment, pretend you want a government that operates with transparency.
The nearly 50-year-old Connecticut Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a set of laws – sometimes called sunshine laws – that assure access to most public records, but this session, the Connecticut Senate has advanced a couple of bills that would limit the ability of the public – and the press – to seek information through FOIA requests.
This should make you nervous if you like to hold your government accountable, or if you want to keep track of public funds. Sadly, most people pay attention to access to information only when they are denied it and by then, it’s too late. As Michael A. Savino, president of the Connecticut Council of Freedom of Information says, you don’t install a fire detector after the house is on fire.
The bills, which await the attention of the state House of Representatives, are part of a bigger trend of shifting FOIA laws, which vary widely from state to state.
One bill would place out of public reach certain information from Connecticut’s public universities and colleges. How that information is defined is fairly broad, including, according to the bill, “any data, record or information of a proprietary nature that is produced or collected by or for the faculty or staff of a public institution of higher education in the conduct of study or research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues or constituting pedagogical materials, including records created by legal clinics for teaching purposes.”
That’s a pretty long list. The concern, from public testimony, appears to be that such records, if shared, could be “used as a weapon to harass and interfere with faculty research, teaching, and scholarship, or used to threaten or chill faculty from their right to academic freedom and unfettered reporting of research,” according to written testimony from UConn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
But as Justin Goodman, White Coat Waste Project senior vice president for advocacy and public policy, wrote in CT Mirror recently, when he was a student at UConn in the early 2000s, the state’s FOIA law allowed him to expose gruesome experiments that were being conducted on rhesus macaque monkeys at the school’s Farmington campus. Those experiments – which proved to be fatal to some of the animals – included drilling holes in the primates’ skulls and implanting steel coils into their eyes.
In today’s heated political climate, “could” be used as a weapon can easily be replaced by “will,” but that is not sufficient reason to move this information out of reach. I teach at a private university. I understand why higher education professionals wouldn’t want to deal with harassment from yahoos who don’t understand, say, scientific research. There will always be people who misuse the access afforded in FOIA requests, but researchers who use public funds should remember that they “are leveraging public dollars and research, and people have a right to be informed about that,” said Savino.
Whatever you feel about such research, isn’t it better to know?
A similar issue – protecting people from undue harassment – seems to drive a second bill, Senate Bill 1157, which bars public agencies from disclosing the home addresses of municipal, state, or federal employees from personnel or similar files. Public safety and judicial employees already have such protection, which is understandable. What judge wants a visit from someone disgruntled by a court decision?
But here, too, must we stretch the veil of secrecy so wide? I guarantee you that I, with not much more than a Google search, can find the home address of just about anyone, and so can you. The bill does not provide security for employees of public agencies. It does, however, fly in the face of an open and transparent government and the wider we stretch the veil, the less informed we will be.
“This information is important,” said Savino. “It’s public for a reason.”
