The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law during the last half of the twentieth century to ensure public access to government documents. In this book, Shannon E. Martin details the history that led to the law’s enactment and the resulting discoveries in government repositories over the past fifty years. In light of the ongoing national security war on terror, this is a timely and historical overview of the accessibility of government-held information.

The Author: Shannon E. Martin is Professor of Communication at the University of Maine. She is the author of Bits, Bytes and Big Brother: Federal Information Control in the Technological Age (1995) and Post-Vietnam Confrontations: U.S. Wars and the Media in Primary Documents (2005). She is also co-author with Kathleen A. Hansen of Newspapers of Record in a Digital Age: From Hot Type to Hot Link (1998), and co-editor with David Copeland of The Function of Newspapers in Society: A Global Perspective (2003).