National Security Archive Director to Examine Government Accountability in April 6 Pitt Lecture

PITTSBURGH-Energy task force meetings with Enron, pre-9/11 warnings about Osama bin Laden, searches of library and Internet provider records-all of these government activities have been conducted in secrecy, according to Thomas S. Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Blanton will discuss government accountability and freedom of information in a talk April 6 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the University of Pittsburgh's Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, Schenley Drive, Oakland.

Blanton's presentation will examine access to government records, challenges to that access, and how to hold the government accountable to its citizens. The lecture, part of the "Policy, Ethics, and Accountability" lecture series cosponsored by Pitt's School of Information Sciences and the Johnson Institute for Responsible Government in the University's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, is free and open to the public.

Blanton is a noted policy expert and advocate for opening up what he calls the "black vault" of government secrecy. He has been featured on NPR, PBS, MSNBC, and many other media outlets discussing government policy on sensitive information, government wiretapping, and the U.S. Intelligence Community's Secret Historical Document Reclassification Program. Blanton filed the Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent lawsuit (with Public Citizen Litigation Group) that forced the release of Oliver North's Iran-Contra diaries in 1990. His books include White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy (New Press, 1995). Blanton has been with the National Security Archive since 1986, becoming its executive director in 1992.

The Archive won the George Polk Award in 2000 for "piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy, guiding journalists in search for the truth, and informing us all." The Los Angeles Times described the Archive as "the world's largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents."

For more details about the Policy, Ethics, and Accountability lecture series, visit www.johnsoninstitute-gspia.org/events.

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