Why Open Government is So Crucial To Our Society - Martha Mendoza @ TEDxSantaCruz

I'm an evangelist about open government I am passionate about the Freedom of Information Act I am passionate about access to information you look at this picture and you probably see paper tied up with string for me this is like crack because documents government documents they hold the truth and the truth always matters and the truth really does set us free so come with me on a quick whirlwind of public records and access to information and I'm going to show you in the next few minutes how public documents can actually bring about wonderful change and I think by the time I'm done all of you are going to be as fired up as I am about the public right to know so how do I get my hands on records how does this work there's a set of laws that are called sunshine laws sunshine laws are simple and they're beautiful the idea is let's let the Sun Shine in on the government open up those doors open up those windows let the light come in and show the truth the framers of our Constitution understood this all too well when they wrote the first amendment they didn't include teachers doctors or lawyers but there it is a free press because the idea is you're going to have the press on the outside holding those three pillars accountable the executive branch the legislative branch the Supreme Court and the fourth pillar on the outside is the press think about it this way if you don't know how your money is being spent if you don't know how decisions are being made if you don't know who is influencing what how do you know really what you support or what you oppose how do you know how to engage in your community keep in mind it's always going to be a fight to find out what the government wants you not to know about but there are powerful tools for this fight and for me my biggest weapon is the Freedom of Information Act a law that says government records government information must be public in 1960 there were two countries that had Freedom of Information acts Sweden and Finland in 1966 the United States got one but in the last 10 years a lot of countries have democratized around the world something exciting has happened country after country has adopted a Freedom of Information Act today most people on the planet have the right to know on paper what's happening inside their government in China in India in South Africa here where it was a hard-fought law I'm going to talk to you about how a piece of paper can bring real truth and real freedom these are federally protected wild horses they're running on federal land here's a federal employee whose job it is to round up the horses and take them to be adopted and here's the horses the federal employees were taking the horses as I followed them through their ID numbers through their databases of where horses go and the federal employees were taking the horses to the slaughterhouse where they were selling them for eight or nine hundred bucks each and pocketing the money themselves after we brought this to light after we used documents to make this public the federal government set up sanctuaries piece of paper to the pasture a few years ago the federal government tested lunch boxes for lid and they reported out that they attested 60 and that none of them had hazardous levels I asked could I see those test results a year later after using the Freedom of Information Act I had a box of hundreds of test results and what I found was that one out of every five lunch boxes had high levels of lead some were ten times the safe levels the Consumer Product Safety Commission told me yes but children would have to lick the lunch boxes to be exposed to that those of us who have children understand children lick everything so after we reported this the thresholds were lowered for what is considered safe and the toxic lunch boxes were pulled from the shelves in Haiti thank you it's not the usual response I get to a news article in Haiti after the earthquake I have been dogged ly tracking what's becoming of that money and as recently as a few months ago again using public records was able to show that of the 1.8 billion dollars the United States pledged to help rebuild and build back better not a single dollar has been spent to build a single permanent home back in Haiti in Honduras earlier this year there was a prison fire 300 men were killed they were locked in their cells and they burned to death within hours of that fire we were pulling up records to show and report that most people in this prison had not even been convicted of a crime and this is a US military recruiter in a federal prison where he was sentenced for raping and enlistee and I went in and I heard his story and I spoke with his victim and then I asked the Defense Department how often does this happen how often do twenty-something recruiters who are in quiet conversation and closed rooms and cars alone with teenage girls how often does this happen and what they told me was in documents 80 times in the past year recruiters had been disciplined for sexual misconduct 80 times in one year as a result of bringing these documents and this information to light the Defense Department set up new rules so that teenage girls and boys were not being put in vulnerable situations and recruiters also felt that they could have more think more safety this woman is Kathleen thorne she's got a newborn a two-year-old a seven-year-old and her husband and within weeks of this picture within two weeks she asked to be her doctor if he could put her on birth control if you've had to and diapers like I have you understand this but within six weeks after her doctor prescribed the patch which is a form of birth control she died of blood clots at the time the patch was considered the same level of safety as the pill they had equal amounts of hormones but if you think about it when you put a patch on your skin those hormones go right into your bloodstream and when you swallow a pill that has to pass through your gastrointestinal tract first so I began looking at cases of death associated with a patch versus the pill and found that it was actually three times riskier pressing the FDA to add a blackbox warning to the patch I want to explain the patch is a good form of birth control for the right people and now prescribers can have a better idea of who it's going to be safe for and who it's not going to be safe for and in doing this story I began wondering what about in Europe right what happens with women with a patch in Europe well in Europe they don't allow it not because it's dangerous to women but because there's no safe way to get rid of it you've got all these hormones left on this piece of patch and what do you do you flush it down the toilet those hormones might enter the waterway you put it in a landfill those hormones trace trace concentrations can get into the soil and so in Europe it wasn't allowed but in the United States it is and this had myself and some colleagues fanning out to water departments around the United States saying have you tested drinking water for pharmaceuticals have you tested drinking water for antibiotics ibuprofen hormones anything like this and what we found was that public water utilities were indeed testing the water for this and just about everywhere they tested they found it but they hadn't told anybody about this because they said they didn't know how safe or unsafe this was they don't know the risks so why tell anybody what's in your own drinking water we thought we would go ahead and share it and we look to the research and found that when you mix those trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals with blood cells they grow too fast they take on strange shapes some shrink so there are some reasons to think that this may impact humans especially with chronic exposure if you think about your drinking water over many years in the environment I'm going to have some of you squirming here it's much more obvious the male frogs the male fish they start to feminized they move in ways that are more like female fish and they start creating egg yolk this prompted Senate hearings and I sat there watching a senator land bass somebody in the EPA and she said why is it that we had to wait for The Associated Press to tell us what's in our drinking water but I was thinking this is how our government is supposed to work we're all doing our jobs here I'm on the outside and I'm holding that branch accountable I'm not inside helping keep it private and it's because we have a free press and because we have an open government that I'm able to do this Jay Leno had a different take he said when he first found out there were drugs in his drinking water he was a little worried but then he had a glass of water with just a little xanax in it already and he found himself not worried at all around this time I got a little heady with the whole Freedom of Information Act thing and I figured if we have a hundred and five countries around the world with laws let's do something no one has ever done before let's ask the same question of all these different governments and let's collect all their answers and see how well they comply with their laws push them to comply with their laws and find out something really important and the really important thing I wanted to find out was how has our world changed since September 11th after the terror attacks the United States and the United Nations press countries around the world to pass anti-terrorism laws there was no definition in those laws of what a terrorist was but we were pressing them to adopt them all the same and so in a single week reporters fanned out and asked how many people have been arrested and how many convicted as terrorists in the last ten years since 9/11 prior to 9/11 there was about a hundred convicted terrorists a year so we were curious to find out how many had how this might have changed things filing Freedom of Information requests getting access to information in government's getting the answer to this relatively simple question how many arrested how many convicted who are they proved to be complicated in Tokyo where you see the central post office it was a matter of mailing a letter in Liberia you had to go to an office and get something stamped in Mexico it's as easy as logging on to a website in Costa Rica you pick up the phone and ask the information Commissioner in the United States I go to my post office and get a letter certified stamped and registered and I send separate ones to seven different agencies and in China we were told to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn how to file Freedom of Information Act requests so we hired an attorney and then we did battle back and forth with these governments Jordan was very reluctant to tell us how they were using their laws other countries were much more open Guatemala Poland these were the first two to come in with answers the United States took six months and is still giving me pieces of the answers but in the end we were able to get big round numbers of how many had been arrested and how many convicted and what we found was astonishing and what we found was that a hundred and twenty thousand people have been arrested and thirty five thousand people convicted as terrorists since 9/11 on the world does this make us safer some of these people were bombers some of these people were plotters some of these people wanted nothing more than to harm innocent civilians Turkey had the most convicted terrorists in Turkey if you are Kurdish and you are fighting for Kurdish rights in any way shape or form you can be convicted as a terrorist Turkey at 12,000 convicted terrorists the most of any country in the world this woman is one of them she's a mother of two who had a protest held up a sign that said Kurdish people should have rights she couldn't read the sign because she's illiterate but she was sentenced to seven years as a terrorist this had me so worked up this project that we created an ongoing website where any of you and I invite you to can come suggest what you would like us to request in Greece in Nepal in Argentina here in the United States and if we like your idea we'll make the request and if we get great documents back we will report on them this is ongoing please work with us on this but before you start thinking this is all very heady and international and what is have to do with us here let's go visit Capitola five miles away our little jewel box of a town years ago using hundreds and hundreds of pages of files from Capitola we found that they were financially completely under water they had defaulted on a ten million dollar bond the feds were knocking at their door they were about to declare bankruptcy and nobody was talking about this only the documents and after we reported this they actually were pushed to get their financial books back into order I went to all the high schools and all the colleges in the county and I said are you complying with title 9 the law that requires equal funding for girls and boys and not a single one was now they do in Watsonville and I was talking to some of the students about this at the county office of Agriculture any of you can walk in and ask to see possessed aside use reports and that's what I did and I saw where they were applying pesticides and I mapped how much how often what time and how close to the schools and then I went to the schools and said how many people here have asthma how many of your kids how many of your teachers have had cancers these are indicators perhaps of being exposed to carcinogens and then we explained in a long clear story using these records that a lot of pesticides were being used very close to schools and at the end of this there came upon some wonderful agreements so that this at the times they were applied the types they were applying the buffer zones could be expanded in the schools were made safer okay if I don't have you drinking my kool-aid about public records yet I think this one will get you this woman is standing at a place called no Gunnery South Korea and she survived a mass shooting inside of this tunnel hundreds of people were killed there fifty years before she hid behind bodies the people at the other ends of the guns of people shooting were US soldiers firing on South Koreans firing on our allies firing on the people they were there to help firing on women and children and the reason for this was because they feared that there were North Koreans infiltrating these large groups of South Korean civilians so the South Koreans a small group of survivors for decades tried to get someone to acknowledge this has happened tried to get this recognized and the US government repeatedly said it didn't happen there were no US troops in the area and when I heard about this I went to the National Archives in Washington DC with a colleague and we found that US troops were indeed in the area and we found their battalion we found their company name and we also found documents with orders fire on civilians use discretion with women and children they are written out the truth on the documents we weren't done we went and found the men aging veterans who 50 years after when I asked them what happened at this place what happened at this time these were men of great conscience and they spoke out and said we shot him we killed them all we had to do it the story won a Pulitzer Prize well the President did not apologize he did express regret which is a long way for toward acknowledging this and it was indeed acknowledged and scholarships were set up for me this underscored what's so important and about having an open government because those pieces of paper were nothing they were just pieces of paper in the National Archives until we were able to bring in that sunlight bring out the documents and let them speak the truth and the truth always matters and as you can see the truth sets us free thank you oh okay so much I have a quick question for you so I feel freer and safer because of what you do and I'm incredibly grateful for it and but if we don't work for The Associated Press you know those of us in the room today and in our community what can we do with this to agitate for justice and a clean environment all the things that you talked on glad you asked me that I actually I didn't expect this but I'm constantly pushing my friends my own kids like go look at those school records and tell me how many Hispanic kids are in your AP classes and how many white kids are in there and how that balances in your school and then take that to the principal and tell the principal there's something not right here I don't have a single Hispanic kid in my AP classes and the school is 25% Hispanic or in your community if you you know on your neighborhood go down to the police station and find out how many break-ins have there been on my block how many times are the patrols coming here this matters to me and you can you know so this whatever you it is you see that's pestering you you can do something about it starting with public records if you go in and you whine and you complain and you try to bring about change you're not going to have the power that you do if you have it right here on paper you know this many tons of garbage has been hauled out of pulgin if during this cleanup this matters to me so let's put our funding in that direction so it really is a strong way to engage so it's just it's not just something that the press can use it's really something that anybody every ordinary citizen can use about I think about 10% of all Freedom of Information Act requests in the country are from the media and most of those are from The Associated Press mostly from you yeah fantastic thank you so much thank you thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 22,582

Keywords: Activism, Martha Mendoza, News, USA, ted, ted talks, tedx talks, tedx talk, English, Associated Press, tedx, Open, Education, TEDxSantaCruz, Entertainment, Freedom of Information, TEDx, ted talk, ted x

Id: KzDE7D52zlA

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2012