Russ Kick, ‘Rogue Transparency Activist,’ Is Dead at 52
takyon writes:
Russ Kick, 'Rogue Transparency Activist,' Is Dead at 52
A self-described "rogue transparency activist" and "investigative archivist," Mr. Kick worked on his own, without institutional support, and posted his findings on his website. He initially called the site the Memory Hole, in honor of the disposal chute through which the authorities in George Orwell's "1984" destroyed embarrassing documents; it ultimately became Altgov2.org.
One of his most notable postings involved an internal Justice Department report, written in 2002, that criticized departmental efforts at diversity hiring. Officials released a heavily redacted version; Mr. Kick downloaded the report, highlighted the black redaction bars and deleted them, making the original text instantly visible.
He was among the first to post documents in full, including all 16,000 pages of the F.B.I.'s file on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (The agency had released only a fraction of them.)
"The work he was doing was phenomenal," David Cuillier, a University of Arizona professor who studies government transparency and public-records access, said in an interview. "He showed that anybody in this country could get public records out of the government, even when the government didn't want to give them out."
But Mr. Kick's life's work went way beyond digging up documents.
Skeptical by nature and mistrustful of authority, he also produced guides and books that punctured myths, with in-your-face titles like "50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know" (2003) and "You Are Being Lied To" (2001), updated in 2009 as "You Are Still Being Lied To."
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