Note: This is one in a series of articles in the SPJ Colorado Pro Chapter’s 2015 Sunshine Week project. Sunshine Week is March 15-21.

By Nancy Watzman

In 1998, civil rights advocate Amos Brown, now a board member of the NAACP, learned the extent to which the government had followed him in the late 1950s, when he was a teenager in segregated Mississippi.

That was when, thanks to litigation by the ACLU, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was forced to open its files. The commission had become a de facto spy agency on the civil rights movement though its goal was supposedly to protect the state from federal overreach follwing the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. the Board of Education to desegregate the nation’s school systems.

Nancy Watzman

Among the papers was a memo detailing how a vice president at a local bank had reported to the town’s mayor that Brown and another activist had opened a bank account and deposited $46.80. The mayor then told the police. Other papers on file at the commission reported how Brown had spoken at meetings, noted his arrests at sit-ins, and referred to him as a “full-fledged agitator.”

The commission had not wanted to release these papers. It took hard work to make them do so. But how invaluable this information is in building  a true picture of the history of this nation. The documents are collected online; now anybody can search them.

Sunshine in government is not a natural phenomenon, as it is in nature. To the extent that we have it, it’s often due to the dogged groups of reporters, advocacy groups like the ACLU, and others who fight for it. And as technology changes, so too does the terms and means of how we can force that sunshine.

At the federal level, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and, in Colorado, the Open Records Act (CORA), remain the backbones for public access to government information and data. But increasingly, advocacy groups such as the Sunlight Foundation and others are arguing for the principle of open data – that the presumption should be on the government to keep things out of reach as opposed to the other way around.

Rather than sitting around waiting for requests to come in from the public, government ought to make information available to all online. Anyone with access to the Internet should be able to pursue their inquiries without the burden of filing a formal request, watching weeks turn into months into years. Sure, there are sometimes reasons why governments need to keep sensitive information from the public. But, of course, what one government at one time and in one place considers “sensitive” is not always in the broader public interest. Just ask Amos Brown, who at 17 had the audacity to open a bank account in Jackson, Mississippi.

Nancy Watzman is a Denver-based reporter who has worked for such watchdog groups as the Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Center for Responsible Politics.