Fresh Skirmishes in the Information Wars

[struggle4progress]

<snip> In separate developments, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sought to obtain the records used by the government to deny U.S. entry to prominent foreign scholars, and four key senators introduced legislation to roll back the ”potentially damaging limitations placed on access to government information” in the last few years.

The ACLU, the largest advocacy group of its kind in the U.S., filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records concerning the government's practice of excluding scholars and other prominent individuals from the U.S. because of their political views.

Citing a serious and growing threat to academic freedom, the ACLU said, ”The government should not be barring scholars from the country simply because it disagrees with what they have to say. Nor should immigration and State Department officials be in the business of determining which ideas Americans may hear and which they may not.” <snip>

In a related development, four Democratic senators led by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont introduced the ”Restore FOIA Act,” to ”strike the appropriate balance between protecting Americans' right to know and restrictions on public access to corporate filings about infrastructure with the federal government.” <snip>

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28089

[bemildred]

1. There is no "appropriate balance" between the public's right to know

and anything. The public has a right to know the public's business,
which is ANYTHING the government is up to, absolutely. The notion
that the government's business is not the public's business is
horseshit.