the Key to the Door.

international | rights, freedoms and repression | other press

Thursday December 30, 2004 13:43

by mac d

2004-1984 = 20

:2005
-1984
=21 you get the key to the door now.

Lord Falconer, the minister in charge of freedom of information, emphasises that the act is not solely for the media and researchers to prise secrets out of Downing Street but will give ordinary members of the public a greater chance to get information from the public sector.

But many are sceptical that officials' secretive habits, and this government's reliance on spin and control, will melt away.

Whitehall has taken a long time to get to this position. A freedom of information act was first promised by Labour in 1974, but nothing happened. The Blair government eventually passed the act in 2000, then delayed its introduction for five years.

More than 50 other countries have passed such legislation before now, the first being Sweden in 1766.

Freedom of information will be slow and fraught with difficulties after such a long and entrenched culture of secrecy which brought us ignorance and the darkness and extended evil of gulible men who thought they knew.

Freedom of information is about Liberty.
Liberty is about Freedom of Information.

We in the movements say a lot that "information wants to be free" we prefer that to "information is power".

which is why we oppose many notions of copyright,
patenting and so on.

By now you ought be familiar with this.

We hope you also heard in popular music of the young generation the phrase "there are no secrets".

We hope you proceed through the doors and gates which were always really open though guarded to a better world.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foi/story/0,9061,1380722,00.html

This final implementation of the British Act may be seen by young Europeans in tandem with the decision on the 23rd of December by the constitutional experts to return the Archives of Salamanca in Spain to the Catalan authorities. The archives covered the interrogations et cetera of the period of history known as the Spanish civil war during the darkness of Europe.

Bring your light through the door please.
We hold these needs to be self-evident.