Last month (September 23, 2003), Armenia became the 51st country in the world to guarantee its citizens the right to know what their government is up to. Armenia's new freedom of information law is the latest outpost of the worldwide movement towards opening government files - a movement that took off in the 1990s and just this year also brought in the world's second most populous country, India, and one of China's largest cities, Guangzhou.

The new openness laws vary tremendously, face huge implementation problems, and often receive only lip service from bureaucrats. But the trend is producing much more government accountability, and often dramatic headlines. For example:

Ironically, civil society and government reformers around the globe are making this extraordinary progress at the very time that the United States is backing away from its previous leadership in open government. Even before the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the U.S. Congress had ordered a re-review of the hundreds of millions of pages declassified under President Clinton (more than all his predecessors put together), on the theory that nuclear-related information might be in those files. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars, this full employment program for securocrats has actually turned up mostly obsolete data on former locations of U.S. nuclear weapons - embarrassing for host governments like Japan's which deceived their own people on the subject, but hardly fodder for terrorist bomb-building.

Also before September 11th, the Bush administration clamped down on presidential records, and covered up the oil industry's influence in energy policymaking by Vice President Dick Cheney. After 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft told federal agencies to look for reasons to withhold information, and President Bush's executive order on secrecy deleted the Clinton admonition of "when in doubt, release." No doubt is allowed in today's White House. While the U.S. Freedom of Information Act continues its status as the most-used in the world (over two million requests per year at a cost of about a dollar per citizen), delays and backlogs are mounting as top officials throw sand in the gears.

The administration's reflexive secrecy will be self-defeating. The bipartisan Congressional investigation of 9/11 concluded that an informed public would be our country's best weapon against terrorism. After all, the Unabomber was only caught after newspapers published his screed and his brother recognized the voice. The right-to-know fights terrorism, corruption, and repression; and the world is embracing, while Washington willfully forgets, the familiar finding by Justice Louis Brandeis: "sunlight is the best disinfectant."