FOIA Expansion Reviewed by U.S. House
An AP newswire article by Laurie Kellman, via The Detroit Free Press, reports that:
Congress is moving to reverse one area of the Bush administration's trend toward secrecy since the 2001 terrorist attacks by expanding the Freedom of Information Act, increasing penalties for noncompliance and making records held by government contractors subject to the law.More here.
The White House isn't saying whether President George W. Bush will sign the bill, S. 2488, once the House acts on it today. With a congressional recess starting at the end of the week, that raises the possibility that the act's first makeover in a decade could become law without his signature. The Senate passed the bill last week.
posted by Fergie @ 12/18/2007 12:25:00 PM
1 Comments:
This is great news for America and will end government agencies ability to hide from the public. At the Thomas Jackson Centers we have our fingers crossed that the President will sign this bill into law under his own signature. His name on the law would be an open endorsement that Open Government is good government. Without his name, the bill will ride out the congressional recess and become law absent the Presidents signature. The new law will also go a long way in answering the question “Are bloggers journalist?” Good question and here is my answer. I am one of three bloggers (correspondents, writers, etc.) on the three blogs of the Thomas Jackson Center. If you visit our site, you’ll see that ClustrMaps has tracked visitors from all over the world who read our blogs. The government may not like to call us journalist even though bloggers have broken some of the biggest stories in recent history. But and the Big But is - that blogs often have more readers than small town newspapers.
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