ABSTRACT
The First Amendment guarantees the right to publish information about government and public issues, but it doesn't help much with access to that information. Mter the attacks of September 11, 2001 and subsequently the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, access to U.S. government information and records became yet more problematic. The government began removing information from the Internet, and it became less responsive to Freedom ofInformation Act requests for information. At the same time, the U.S. government's willingness to surveil even its own people by tracking electronic media, including telephone, Internet search, and email data, has inspired comparisons to authoritarian regimes. The government's aggressive secrecy and surveillance efforts have raised profound constitutional questions at a time when print news media have been in decline and have therefore been increasingly unable to hold that government accountable.
