From E-Government to Good Governance and from Good Governance to Development... The Arab world in the global E-Government readiness report 2005 Arab E-government

Digital-age secrecy

Time was that any of us could walk into a branch of government, ask for a record, sit down at a counter and read it ourselves. For free.

But in the age of e-government, public information - particularly that within state and federal agencies - is getting harder to access.

Today, news organizations like the Register are billed thousands of dollars to retrieve electronic information that is their legal right to have. Thousands more dollars are spent on open-records legal battles, while legislators - who have deftly exempted themselves from having to comply with Iowa's freedom-of-information law - exempt ever more information from public disclosure.

In fairness, many in state government have toiled long hours - over days and weekends in some cases - to comply with substantial requests for information made under Iowa's freedom-of-information law. Here at the Register, reporters have, on occasion, requested entire months' worth of e-mails within agencies, tables full of documents and correspondence spanning months.

Frequently, we are asked to narrow the scope of broad open-records requests, and almost always we oblige as best we can to limit the burden.

Today, many agencies have freedom-of-information policies that spell out how much workers can charge to retrieve and supervise information. But depending on what is requested - and sometimes even the person or agency requesting it - officials stray wildly from those policies.

Sometimes citizens are charged nothing for information, but lawyers and businesses are billed considerably more. One reporter may be charged nothing by an agency to transfer hundreds of electronic records onto a computer disc. Another - seeking potentially controversial information - will be told it would cost thousands of dollars to obtain the same type of information using similar software.