A nonpartisan (lower-case libertarian) statement on openness and full disclosure, with illustration:
For decades, I’ve been an unrelenting advocate of extreme openness and transparency in government at all levels, for accountability’s sake. [Core principle: It’s your and my tax dollars spent, therefore we are entitled to know.]
Freedom of Information Act is a great concept, but 1) is woefully incomplete, inadequately absolute and full of loopholes, and 2) should be needed far less than it is invoked in 2022. The latter is because the overwhelming majority of documents susceptible to FOIA (and much, much more) already should be digitized and freely available at will, online, unencumbered by hassles and waits of the request process. Don’t make the media and taxpayers request stuff; put it out there proactively, immediately!
When governments (including governmental arms such as science labs, law enforcement and school districts) refuse to disclose non-personal (non-PII) info, or stonewall and foot-drag FOIA requests, that naturally and understandably engenders suspicion and conspiracy theories about cover-ups. Do you want to greatly reduce conspiracy theories about governmental activity? Great, so do I! Here’s the solution: be fully open and transparent about it.
In science, openness is absolutely crucial. It’s a fundamental scientific principle. The core ethics of reproducibility and falsifiability demand it. This also has been a consistent position of mine this entire century, and motivated a team of similarly minded scientists and I to found the first fully open-access, no-cost to readers, open-review meteorology journal in the United States (EJSSM), still going after over 15 years.
Scientific results should be openly available for all to read and learn, immediately upon publication, across all sciences, all the time. Science-journal paywalls, even if temporary, are unscientific — a grotesque violation of the full-openness principle, and should be eliminated today. Do you want to greatly reduce conspiracy theories about scientific activity? Great, so do I! Here’s the solution: be fully open and transparent about it.
These principles, therefore, doubly apply to government-supported or -conducted science. Do you want to greatly reduce conspiracy theories about governmental scientific activity? Great, so do I! Here’s the solution: be fully open and transparent about it.
The same also applies to pretty much any other publicly funded activity at any level, local to state to national, including school curricula, minutes of policy meetings, budgetary deliberations, committees and subcommittees, “white papers” and other reports, and basically every document produced that doesn’t contain personally identifiable information (PII) or legitimately classified national-security sensitivities. Even in the latter cases, simply claiming that should be insufficient for denying access. The agency should bear the burden of proving that claim before an independent watchdog, judge or arbiter.