FOIA is an acronym that stands for the Freedom of Information act. It requires government organizations to disclose public records for reasonable and specific requests. Complimentary to FOIA is The Privacy Act of 1974 which prevents the release of individuals' sensitive information to others. In a way, you can say that the Privacy Act was passed to narrow the scope or rather reach of FOIA. FOIA was approved by LBJ and passed by the Supreme Court under the rationale that democracy can not function in an ignorant society. It is also intended as a deterrent to hold immoral individuals accountable. As for the Privacy Act, it was signed by President Ford into law to restore faith in the institution through transparency after the Nixon Administration.
On a somewhat related note, the exchange and sharing of information became common practice around the 70s, even in criminal investigation and law enforcement due to the introduction of databases. 🌞Sunshine laws🌞 are state legislation that outline information practices. The Rule about state laws is that you can make them "Stricter per say" than federal laws. As we can aprehend from the module videos it can still be difficult to have FOIA requests filled on a case basis. Sometimes this can be for legitimate, valid reasons and others are a failure of the system. Sunshine laws may attribute to this but I believe that other factors might be that it can be difficult to interpret information laws and there could also be a lack of definition of it. As I mentioned Sunshine laws can easily subvert FOIA, but we must also consider what incrimidation is intentionally left off government records as a result of FOIA's existane to begin with.
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