Another lecture in the Policy, Ethics and Accountability Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Johnson Institute for Responsible Government at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, is available for viewing on the Web.  If you go to http://mediasite.cidde.pitt.edu/mediasite/viewer/?peid=fc4189f3-9a19-40f, then scroll down the left side to Information Sciences and click, you will find the information about the lecture and can view it.
 
Thomas S. Blanton, Executive Director of the National Security Archive, George Washington University, lectured on April 6, 2006 on the topic, “Is Government Still Accountable?” Blanton discussed headline-making news about government accountability and freedom of information, examining access to government records, challenges to that access, and how to hold the government accountable to its citizens.  .  
 
Mr. Blanton, who filed his first Freedom of Information Act request in 1976, is a noted policy expert and advocate for opening up the “black vault” of government secrecy.   He has been recently featured on NPR, PBS, MSNBC, and numerous other media outlets discussing government policy on sensitive information, government wiretapping, and the U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program.  Mr. Blanton has been with the Archive since 1986, becoming the Executive Director in 1992.  The Archive won U.S. journalism's George Polk Award in April 2000 for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all." The Los Angeles Times (16 January 2001) described the Archive as "the world's largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents." 
 
Blanton’s books include White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy, which The New York Times described as "a stream of insights into past American policy, spiced with depictions of White House officials in poses they would never adopt for a formal portrait." He co-authored The Chronology on the Iran-contra affair, and served as a contributing author to three editions of the ACLU's authoritative guide, Litigation Under the Federal Open Government Laws, and to the Brookings Institution study Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. His articles have appeared in The International Herald-Tribune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Slate, the Wilson Quarterly, and many other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, where he was an editor of the independent university daily newspaper The Harvard Crimson, he won Harvar!
 d's 1979 Newcomen Prize in history. He also received the 1996 American Library Association James Madison Award Citation for "defending the public's right to know." He is a founding editorial board member of freedominfo.org, the virtual network of international freedom of information advocates; and serves on the editorial board of H-DIPLO, the diplomatic history electronic bulletin board, and on the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, among other professional activities.
 

 

--
Richard J. Cox 
Professor 
Department of Library and Information Sciences 
School of Information Sciences 
University of Pittsburgh 
Editor, Records & Information Management Report 
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 
Voice: 412-624-3245 
FAX: 412-648-7001 
e-mail: [log in to unmask] 
homepage: http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/%7Ercox/

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