National FOI Day conference speakers

Steven Aftergood is a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. He directs the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, which works to reduce the scope of government secrecy, to accelerate the declassification of cold war documents, and to promote reform of official secrecy practices. In 1997, he was the plaintiff in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency which successfully led to the declassification and publication of the total intelligence budget ($26.6 billion in 1997) for the first time in 50 years. An electrical engineer by training, he joined the FAS staff in 1989. He is being inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame this year.

Scott Armstrong is an investigative journalist and executive director of the Information Trust, a nonprofit organization devoted to facilitating freedom of expression in the U.S. and abroad, improving the quality of journalism, increasing accountability in government through access to information and reforming abuses of government secrecy. He is the co-author with Bob Woodward of The Brethren, a narrative account of the Supreme Court from 1969 through 1976, and assisted Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as a researcher/writer on The Final Days. He is the founder of the National Security Archive, a private, nonprofit research institute that provides journalists, scholars, congressional staffs, present and former public officials, other public interest organizations and the general public with comprehensive government documentation. He has been inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame and awarded the James Madison Award by the American Library Association.

David Banisar is an attorney in the Washington, D.C., area specializing in information issues including electronic surveillance, data protection, cyber-crime, new technologies, freedom of information, and consumer privacy. He is deputy director of Privacy International, a United Kingdom-based human rights group dedicated to privacy, free speech and freedom of information worldwide; a senior fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center; counsel to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University; and a consultant to many NGOs on information issues. He is the author of numerous studies, books, and articles on privacy, surveillance, and data protection including The Electronic Privacy Papers and Privacy and Human Rights 2000: An International Study of Privacy Laws and Practices.

Robert S. Becker is an attorney in Washington, D.C., who counsels journalists, authors, editors, publishers and other creative individuals on media-related legal issues, including access to government information. From 1982 to 1991 he was assistant director for publications and a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where he advised lawyers and journalists and wrote several amicus curiae briefs on the media's right of access to court proceedings and records. He was a newspaper reporter and editor for 12 years.

Tom Blanton is director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington D.C. The archive won the George Polk Award last year for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy.” Blanton served as the Archive’s first director of planning and research beginning in 1986, became deputy director in 1989, and executive director in 1992. Previously, he worked as a journalist, foundation staffer, campaign consultant, and congressional aide. He filed his first FOIA request, the first of several hundred, in 1976 as a reporter in Minnesota. His lawsuit (with Public Citizen Litigation Group) forced the release of Oliver North’s diaries in 1990. His books include White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages the Reagan-Bush White House Tried to Destroy and, as co-author, The Chronology on the Iran-contra affair. He served as a contributing author to three editions of the ACLU’s 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 New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. He has done FOI work in 27 countries ranging from Japan to Albania.

William F. Chamberlin has been the Joseph L. Brechner Eminent Scholar in Mass Communications at the College of Journalism and Communications of the University of Florida since 1987. He now serves as director of the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project. He also is founding director of the college’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information and an affiliate professor of the UF College of Law. He is the co-author (with Kent Middleton and Robert Trager) of a major undergraduate textbook in mass media law, The Law of Public Communication, now in its fifth edition. He is the co-editor (with Charlene Brown) of The First Amendment Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Meaning of Freedom of Speech and Press. He has spoken frequently to public and media groups about access to government information, the First Amendment, regulation of the electronic media, and libel. He has testified before committees of Congress and the Florida legislature as well as the Florida State Growth Management Data Network Coordinating Council and the Florida State Bureau of Archives and Records Management.

Eliot Christian is architect of the Global Information Locator Service (GILS) at the U.S. Geological Survey. He is helping develop and promote a global vision for information access that enhances the free flow of information through decentralized information locator services. He helped establish this approach in law, policy, standards, and technology at the United States Federal level, building consensus among government agencies and developing key support among libraries and information service organizations and corporations. He has been carrying these ideas to other levels of government and internationally, leading the ISO Metadata Working Group and consulting on a variety of initiatives supporting a Global Information Infrastructure. He joined the U.S. Geological Survey in 1986.

Barbara Cochran has been president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association since April 1997. RTNDA is the world’s largest professional organization devoted to electronic journalism, representing local and network news executives in broadcasting, cable and other electronic media in more than 30 countries. Her 30-year career in journalism has included positions as vice president of news and Washington bureau chief, CBS News; executive producer, NBC’s Meet the Press; vice president of news, National Public Radio; and managing editor, The Washington Star. She has appeared frequently on CNN’s Reliable Sources and has appeared on C-SPAN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and National Public Radio. She has testified before Congress on First Amendment rights, the Freedom of Information Act, cameras and microphones in the courtroom, broadcast standards and media ethics.

Charles N. Davis is executive director of the Freedom of Information Center and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He has conducted research on more than a dozen freedom of information issues involving electronic access, privatization and enforcement of access laws. His 1998 study of prison access commissioned by the Society of Professional Journalists earned Davis a Sunshine Award. Davis worked for nearly 10 years as a journalist in Georgia, Florida and Ireland. He served as a research fellow in the College of Journalism and Communication’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, assisting reporters and citizens with FOI questions at the state and federal level. His research on FOI issues has appeared in News Media and the Law, Newspaper Research Journal, Journalism and Mass Media Quarterly and Communication Law & Policy, as well as in law reviews.

Rebecca Daugherty has been director of the FOI Service Center, a special project of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press since 1987. She is an attorney and an editor of Tapping Officials' Secrets, a 50-state and District of Columbia guide to open records and open meeting laws. She is also the editor of How to Use the Federal FOI Act, a guide to federal access laws. She is a past president of the American Society of Access Professionals. She has been a reporter and a copy editor for various newspapers and has been an FOI specialist at the U.S. Department of the Interior. She is being inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame this year.

James E. Grossberg, a founding partner of the Washington, D.C., law firm of Levine Sullivan & Koch, L.L.P., has represented newspapers, broadcasters, and magazine, book and newsletter publishers in a variety of access, privacy, and First Amendment matters across the nation. He serves as principal First Amendment and news room legal counsel for The Orange County Register in California, and represents media clients ranging from CBS to the Newsletter and Electronic Publishers Association. He is a past president of the principal national association of media attorneys — the Defense Counsel Section of the Libel Defense Resource Center — and currently chairs the center’s Legislative Affairs Committee. He also has chaired several subcommittees of the American Bar Association addressing First Amendment and access issues. He has litigated access and First Amendment cases in more than a dozen states and the District of Columbia, as well as in the United States Supreme Court and federal courts of appeal. He has authored articles for the Washington Journalism Review and Quill magazine, and has lectured frequently on First Amendment and media law issues before attorneys, journalists and journalism students.

Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., is chair of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information Committee. Before coming to The News & Observer, where he has been editor, managing editor and metro editor the past 10 years, he worked as an editor and reporter at The Miami Herald, The (Atlantic City, N.J.) Press and the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News Record. He is a graduate of George Washington University.

Judge Rudolph Kass has been a Massachusetts Appellate Court jurist since 1979, when he was appointed to the bench by former Gov. Michael Dukakis. He turned 70 last June and was required to retire under state law. He continues to serve the appeals court, on a recall basis, because of a large backlog of cases. He is the chairman of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's Web Advisory Board. He is a native of Magdeburg, Germany, but came to the United States at age 3. His background includes stints as managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, part-time Berlin correspondent for a Boston newspaper, and suspected international spy. In 1953, he was arrested as a spy by the East German secret police while taking photographs in East Berlin while on assignment for the Boston Traveler. He was interrogated and held for three days.

James S. Keat is a retired newspaper editor. He is the SPJ Project Sunshine chair for Maryland. He was co-chair of the Freedom of Information Committee, Maryland-Delaware-District of Columbia Press Association from 1993 to 1997 and now serves as a consultant to that committee. The association named its annual Freedom of Information Award (to the member paper that did the most for FOI) after him this year. He was a visiting instructor in journalism at Towson State University from 1995 to 1996 and in 2000. He received the Society of Professional Journalists First Amendment Award in 1991. From 1989 to 1991, he was chairman of an ad hoc editors group that worked for changes in Maryland Open Meetings Law. He was a financial news reporter for the New York Herald Tribune from 1952 to 1953. He spent 39 years at The (Baltimore) Sun, from 1956 to 1995, and served as a reporter, foreign correspondent (New Delhi), editorial writer, Washington correspondent, founder of Perspective (Sunday news analysis) section, foreign editor, assistant managing editor, and editorial page coordinator.

Bill Ketter is vice president/community relations and assistant to the publisher for The Boston Globe. From 1998 to 2001, he was the chairman of the Boston University journalism school, and from 1978 to 1998, editor and senior vice president of The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., a suburban Boston daily newspaper. From 1962 to 1978, he served as a reporter, editor and senior corporate executive of United Press International during a 16-year stint with the news agency. He started in the newspaper business as a reporter at the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald while working his way through the University of North Dakota (BA/MA) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ketter is a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board and a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, an organization from which he received a distinguished service award for extraordinary work on First Amendment issues.

Jane E. Kirtley has been the Silha Professor of Media Ethics and Law at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota since August 1999. Prior to that, she was executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, Va., for 14 years. She was appointed director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law in May 2000. She speaks frequently on First Amendment and freedom of information issues, both in the United States and abroad. She writes the “The Press and the Law” column each month for American Journalism Review. She has received many awards and honors, including induction into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement in 1999; the FOIA Hall of Fame in 1996; and the John Peter Zenger Award for Freedom of the Press and the People’s Right to Know from the University of Arizona in 1993.

Bill Kovach is chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and recently retired curator of the Nieman Foundation’s journalism fellowships at Harvard University, the world’s oldest mid-career education program for journalists. He has been a journalist and writer for 40 years, including 18 years as a reporter and editor for The New York Times. He served as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for two years, during which time the paper won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first awarded the paper in 20 years. He was appointed a Nieman Fellow in the class of 1988-89 and remained as curator. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is co-author with Tom Rosenstiel of Warp Speed: America in the Age of Mixed Media. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Washington Post, New Republic and many other newspapers and magazines in the United States and abroad.

Nancy Kranich is the president of the American Library Association, on leave from her position as associate dean of libraries at New York University. She established the Coalition on Government Information in 1986, and, shortly thereafter, launched the annual James Madison Award ceremonies on Freedom of Information Day. She has made 200 presentations and written more than 60 articles on topics related to information policy and legislative advocacy. She currently serves as a member of the advisory boards of the National Security Archive in Washington and the Annenberg Public Policy Center Program on Children and the Media, and as a judge for Project Censored.

Forrest M. (Frosty) Landon is executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, which he helped organize five years ago. The coalition is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that advocates for openness in Virginia government. It has nearly 200 members. He currently serves as president of the National Freedom of Information Coalition, whose members include FOI groups in 35 states. Landon retired in the fall of 1995 as executive editor/vice president of The Roanoke Times, after working 30 years as a newspaper editor and, earlier, 10 years as a radio-TV journalist, all in Roanoke. He is a former chairman of the FOI Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and has been a member of the Virginia Press Association's FOI Committee for more than a decade. In 1988, the Richmond chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists gave him the George Mason Award for outstanding contributions to Virginia journalism. A decade later, he was inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame and given SPJ's national Freedom of Information Award.

Kate Martin is director of the Center for National Security Studies and general counsel to the National Security Archive. The National Security Archive, a research library located at George Washington University, is the most prolific and successful nonprofit user of the Freedom of Information Act and the world’s largest nongovernment collection of declassified U.S. government documents. The center is a nonprofit human rights and civil liberties organization that works to prevent claims of national security from eroding civil liberties or constitutional procedures. She frequently testifies before Congress on secrecy and classification as well as other issues. She has litigated cases involving the entire range of national security and civil liberties issues, including successfully suing the CIA for disclosure of the intelligence budget and preventing destruction of White House e-mail messages. She is a new inductee into the FOIA Hall of Fame.

Patrice McDermott is the senior information policy analyst for OMB Watch, a nonprofit research, educational and advocacy organization whose goals include promoting public access to government information and encouraging broad public participation in government decision-making to promote a more open and accountable government. She co-directs OMB Watch’s Agenda for Access initiative — a project to strengthen public access to government information through a proactive agenda that grows out of the problems, needs and experiences of the nonprofit sector in the use of federal government information. She has lead responsibilities for promoting public access initiatives, monitoring information policy and e-government issues. She has testified in congressional hearings and is a frequent speaker on public access issues. She is also a regular columnist on information policy for Federal Computer Week. She is being inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame this year.

Paul K. McMasters is the First Amendment ombudsman at The Freedom Forum. He joined The Freedom Forum in 1992 after 33 years in daily journalism, the last 10 at USA TODAY, where he was associate editorial director. He regularly writes and lectures on First Amendment and freedom of information issues. Additionally, he testifies before Congress and government commissions and serves as a resource for the public and the press on free speech and free press matters. He is a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and served as the National Freedom of Information chair for that organization from 1986 to 1990. In 1996, he was inducted into the FOIA Hall of Fame and last year received the John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award for his First Amendment and FOI work.

Carol Melamed is vice president of government affairs for The Washington Post. She was named to the position in January 1995. She joined The Post in 1979 as assistant counsel and became associate counsel the following year. She had practiced law at the D.C. firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., for a year prior to that. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1967 with high honors in English literature and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Master of Arts in Teaching degree in 1969 from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and a JD in 1974 from Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law.

Patrick B. Murray was named chief counsel of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in March 1997. He is responsible for the legislative activity of the committee. From 1996 to 1997, he was deputy chief counsel, House Select Subcommittee to Investigate the U.S. Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia. Previously, he was counsel to the House Committee on the Judiciary. He is the author of “Hedonic Damages: Properly a Factor Within Pain and Suffering, 42 U.S.C. Section 1983,” which is published at 10 Northern Illinois University Law Review 37 (1990).

John Podesta, visiting professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, served as chief of staff to President Clinton from October 1998 to January 2001. In that capacity, he was responsible for directing, managing, and overseeing all policy development, daily operations, and staff activities of the White House and coordinating the work of federal departments and agencies. He first served in the Clinton administration from January 1993 to 1995 as assistant to the president and staff secretary. He also served as a senior policy adviser to the President on government information, privacy, telecommunications security and regulatory policy. Following his tenure as staff secretary, he joined the faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center, his alma mater, as a visiting professor of law, teaching courses on congressional investigations, legislation, copyright and public interest law. In January 1997, he returned to the White House as an assistant to the president and deputy chief of staff.

Peter S. Prichard is president of The Freedom Forum, the nation’s largest foundation devoted solely to media issues, and its affiliate, the Newseum, the world’s only interactive museum of news. He was named president June 1, 1997. From 1996 until then, he was executive director of the Newseum, the world’s first interactive museum of news. He led the team of news and museum professionals that built the Forum’s $50 million museum and park project in Arlington, Virginia. From 1988 through 1995, he was editor of USA TODAY. He is also the author of The Making of McPaper, the Inside Story of USA TODAY, which sold 28,000 copies in hardcover and was named one of the best journalism books of 1988 by Kappa Tau Alpha, the National Journalism Scholarship Society.

Jeffrey H. Smith is the responsible partner for Arnold & Porter’s Public Policy and Legislative practice group. He also practices in the International practice group. In October 1996, he rejoined the firm after serving as general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency from May 1995 to September 1996. In May 1993, he was appointed to the congressionally mandated Commission to Review the Roles and Missions of the Armed Services. Previously, he chaired the Joint Security Commission, established to review security policy and practices in the defense and intelligence communities. In late 1992 and early 1993, he served as the chief of the Clinton Transition Team at the Department of Defense. He has lectured and written on national security and international law.

David Sobel is general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. EPIC is a leading advocacy organization dealing with privacy rights and seeks to protect and promote citizens' rights to control information about themselves. He is also a long-time supporter of open access to government records and has litigated dozens of cases under the Freedom of Information Act seeking the disclosure of records on a broad range of subjects.