Items17The creator’s order
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Anders ChydeniusThe world's first freedom of information law came from a country parson in the Finnish part of the Swedish kingdom. Chydenius, a member of the Riksdag's clergy estate, chaired the committee behind the Freedom of the Press Act of 1766, which abolished political censorship and gave the public a legal…0i - 2
John E. MossBorn 13 Apr 1915Moss, a Sacramento Democrat, spent eleven years on the problem before the US Freedom of Information Act passed. Starting in 1955 he chaired a House subcommittee that collected thousands of examples of agencies refusing records, and he kept pressing even when presidents of his own party resisted.…0i - 3
Scott Armstrong (journalist)A former Senate Watergate investigator and Washington Post reporter, Armstrong founded the National Security Archive in 1985 to do something individual reporters could not: file FOIA requests systematically, pool the declassified results and keep them in one public library. It now holds millions of…0 - 4
Joachim GauckBorn 24 Jan 1940When East German citizens occupied Stasi offices in 1989 and 1990 to stop files being shredded, the question became who should see them. Gauck, a Rostock pastor and civil rights activist, became the first federal commissioner for the Stasi records in 1990, and under the 1991 Stasi Records Act his…0i - 5
Maurice FrankelBritain got its Freedom of Information Act in 2000, but the campaign behind it had been winning smaller rights for years. Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information since 1987, drafted and steered a run of private member's bills that gave people the legal right to see their own…0i - 6
Carl MalamudBorn 2 Jul 1959Malamud's method is to publish first and argue later. In 1993 he bought the US Securities and Exchange Commission's company filings and put them online free, a service the SEC took over itself two years later. Through Public.Resource.Org he has since posted court opinions, government videos, and…0i - 7
Aruna RoyBorn 26 May 1946India's Right to Information Act of 2005 began with day labourers in rural Rajasthan who suspected they were being cheated on public works wages. Roy, a former civil servant, and her colleagues in the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, among them Nikhil Dey and Shankar Singh, started holding jan…0i - 8
Brewster KahleBorn 22 Oct 1960Public information that disappears from a website is as lost as a burned file. Kahle founded the Internet Archive in 1996 and opened the Wayback Machine in 2001, which has since saved more than a trillion web pages. With libraries and universities, the archive captures US federal websites at each…0i - 9
Tom SteinbergSteinberg founded the charity mySociety in 2003 with a simple test: would an ordinary person with no expertise find this useful? Building on volunteer projects, it launched TheyWorkForYou, which turned Hansard into searchable pages for every MP with their speeches and voting records, and later…0i - 10
Ellen S. MillerCampaign finance disclosure in the United States existed on paper long before most people could use it. Miller founded the Center for Responsive Politics in 1983, which turned Federal Election Commission filings into the searchable OpenSecrets database of who gives to whom, now a standard tool for…0i
