Extract
The Freedom of Information Act as a methodological tool: suing the government for data.
As many commentators have noted, the phrase freedom of information represents a certain kind of public myth. So-called liberal, democratic governments keep a lot of information secret, or prevent its disclosure through obfuscation and delay, but use the ideology of access to government information as a means of shoring up the state's legitimacy (Woodbury 1995; Scalia 1982; Edelman 1971; Tudor 1972). If governments were serious about information access, as Woodbury (1995: 51) notes, then information acts would have teeth to them, providing punitive damages, the discipline or dismissal of employees, and access to parliamentary or congressional information as well (information often exempted by legislators). Indeed, this notion of liberal democratic pluralism--that the "public" benefits from the disclosure of government information and thus uses this information to lobby its representatives--is merely false advertising. Because of the complexity of access law, there has arisen a whole cottage industry of access requesters and responders who specialize in the field (thereby limiting entry), not to mention the media, private industry, and political parties, who use the various acts for private or partisan purposes (Kester 1998). Criminological theory suggests that this is a function of ruling elites and class power (Bonger 1916; Chambliss and Seidman 1971; Taylor 1999), which are camouflaged with notions like democracy and access to government information. As Carl Schmitt (1985) observes, the term citizen is a facile abstraction that fails to reflect one's gender, race, or class status. It is used liberally to camouflage certain elite interests that have access to information technology, the media, the techniques of information access, and the generally favourable decisions of judicial bodies.
This article is designed to outline a method of collecting data rarely used by academic criminologists, one that probably falls within the theoretical gambit of conflict or critical criminology. I will first briefly describe the use of both the American and Canadian access legislation (or FOIA, as it is more commonly known in the States, and the ATIA in Canada) by a number of academic researchers (2) and then proceed to highlight two lawsuits in which the author was the sole plaintiff. In so doing, I wish to underscore both the potentials of...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
