Governments in many states are shirking transparency laws and blocking the public’s right to know, choosing instead to protect the intellectual property rights of private vendors.
“This is not a Kansas problem. It’s not an Oregon problem. It’s an everywhere problem,” Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, told KCUR-FM, Kansas City’s NPR station, for a Nov. 18, 2021, article.
Kansas has allowed auditors and corporations to redact various documents related to drug spending on state employees, even though open-records lawyers say information in the documents should be public.
When governments do this, they effectively outsource the redaction process, placing a private company’s interests above the rights of the public, experts say.