I was watching Frost/ Nixon the other day, a movie portraying how showbiz personality David Frost humbled former US President Nixon in a series of TV interviews. The story played out showing how Nixon had this air of confidence around him, secure in his self-righteousness, with Frost struggling to get the confession regarding the Watergate scandal his ratings badly needed.
As history would tell us, Frost succeeded. He played his trump card at the last minute: some obscure information retrieved from the National Archives in Washington DC--a transcript of a conversation involving Nixon (on the coverup), which the latter thought was already erased.
Talk about the existence of such information, let alone access to it. And this was in the 70s.
Fast forward to 2010. A classmate in another class shared how some legislators prefer burning old records and documents instead of digitizing them in a secure storage (or at least keeping the hard copies). I imagined staff members stacking documents behind Batasan, then lighting fires in huge steel barrels. Voila! No more clutter in the office.
And no more records the public can refer to, when simple curiosity needs to be satisfied, or when public welfare requires information. Assuming the bonfire story weren’t true, still a lot remains to be said regarding the government’s capacity to store information. Sure the government is becoming technology savvy with their use of websites and all, but the inefficiency of record-keeping renders the right to information pointless. This adds to the red-tape we have to deal with, and breeds corruption by destroying traces of wrongdoing which may lead to the perpetrators in government.
Access to information? What information?
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