Petition: Freedom of Information Act

[Imzogelmo]

Sign if you would like to bring the following to a vote:

1. Any citizen, upon written request, may obtain information from any member of the Executive, Legislative, or Judicial branch, which must be released.
2. The Senate may pass laws limiting the types of information that must be disclosed. The types of limitations must also be made public.

[Eluvatar]

This is overly broad, in my opinion, and without existing confidentiality laws would break expectations of the MoIA.

It should be explicit that we should honour requests to keep a WA nation confidential.

We should not be required to publish the membership of our armies, or the Ministry of Regional Security.

I'm sure there are other such criteria.

[Gulliver]

I do agree with the sentiment of the proposal. It does specify, Elu, that certain types of information can be declared confidential by law. That said, I think it would be better to define that sort of information within any freedom of information act itself.

[Imzogelmo]

Clause 2 would certainly give the Senate power to create broad categories of information that would be held secret for regional security.
However, perhaps what is really needed is a revision such that a time frame (1 week-ish) is specified, during which time the answer or reason for not giving it is provided. I didn't go that route because it would make a lot of redundant work on the officials. A better method would be to simply spell out the white list and black list within the law.

EDIT: ninja'd

[Eluvatar]

A white list and a black list and room for discretion?

In an old draft of mine, the system was any citizen could request, the govt could refuse but then the Senate got to automatically review that refusal.