Tom Curley became president and chief executive officer of The Associated Press on June 1, 2003. He is the 12th person to lead AP since its founding in 1846. Under Curley’s leadership, AP is evolving from a wire service into an interactive global news network. At the same time, Curley has deepened AP’s longstanding commitment to the people’s right to know, and serves as one of the country’s most visible and aggressive advocates for open government.

A seminal date for Curley’s tenure as leader of the world’s largest newsgathering organization was May 7, 2004. He outlined his initiative for more open government at all levels in the United States, calling on his news-industry colleagues to do more to protect freedom of information. “The powerful have to be watched, and we are the watchers,” he said in his hallmark Hays Press Enterprise lecture.

Under his leadership, AP played a critical role in the establishment of a coalition of news organizations and journalism-related groups to promote accessible, accountable and open government. The Washington, D.C.-based Sunshine in Government Initiative seeks to combat what the groups see as increased government secrecy since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

After Sunshine Week 2005, Curley told the National Freedom of Information Coalition “the most important battle lines are drawn and the greatest advances on FOI have been made in your bailiwicks — in county seats and city halls and statehouses.”

The Associated Press handles more than 40 actions a year to assure journalists have access to events, proceedings and information. AP’s commitment to freedom of information is illustrated by its determined work to report on the hundreds of detainees being held nameless and incommunicado at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Last year, after months of FOI requests, a formal written appeal and a federal lawsuit, thousands of pages of transcripts and other documents were finally released. Even so, many were missing, names excluded and portions blacked out. AP protested again. In February 2006, a federal judged ordered the Pentagon to release the uncensored transcripts of detainee hearings, which contain the names of the detainees.

Curley was previously president and publisher of USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper. From 1998 he was also senior vice president of the newspaper’s owner, Gannett Co., Inc., publisher of 100 daily newspapers in the United States.

      Tom Devine is the legal director of the Government Accountability Project, where he has championed whistleblower rights since 1979. Over his career, he has assisted more than 7,000 whistleblowers in exposing corruption and defending against retaliation, helping spark reforms in nuclear safety, food inspection, drug safety, and national security. He has won key victories in federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court. 

      Devine has been a driving force behind 34 national and international whistleblower laws, including nearly all major U.S. federal statutes in the past two decades, as well as groundbreaking policies at the United Nations, European Union, and World Bank. He has traveled to 36 countries as a global advocate and is known informally within the State Department as the “Ambassador of Whistleblowing.” 

      He is the co-author of The Corporate Whistleblower’s Survival Guide, which won the 2012 International Business Book of the Year Award, and Courage Without Martyrdom: The Whistleblower’s Survival Guide. A frequent media commentator, Tom has been recognized annually by Washingtonian magazine as one of D.C.’s top employment lawyers and serves on the board of the Whistleblowing International Network.

      Devine is a Phi Beta Kappa honors graduate of Georgetown University and earned his J.D. from the Antioch School of Law. He currently sits on the board of the Disaster Accountability Project, as well as Whistleblowers International Network, which he helped found.

(Updated April 2025)

Kevin Goldberg is a vice president and First Amendment expert at Freedom Forum, where he works to educate the public on the importance of the First Amendment and oversees Freedom Forum’s network of experts.

During his 25 years in private practice at two law firms, Goldberg focused on First Amendment, FOIA and intellectual property issues for clients including the News Leaders Association, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, World Press Freedom Committee and Global Investigative Journalism Network. He also taught a class in journalism and First Amendment law for seven years at George Mason University and has spoken at events sponsored by the State Department and nonprofits in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Beginning with the Electronic Freedom of Information Act in 1996, Goldberg was involved in virtually all major efforts to reform (or prevent reform of) the Freedom of Information Act on Capitol Hill, culminating in the current Open Government Act through 2019. He served on the federal Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee during its 2018-2020 term.

In addition to this legislative work and related work within the executive branch, Goldberg extended his FOI advocacy to the public, writing regularly on these topics for many organizations. He kept the nation’s newspaper editors alerted of changes to FOIA through articles in the ASNE publication, The American Editor. He did the same for the media lawyers as chair of the Legislative Committee of the Media Law Resource Center from 2004-2008, writing a monthly article on key legislation and providing a list of bills pending in Congress which would affect FOIA and the First Amendment.

Goldberg also wrote the federal legislative update for the National FOI Day Conference for several years.

(Updated April 2025)

Morton Halperin is director of U.S. advocacy at the Open Society Institute, executive director of the Open Society Policy Center, and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

While with the American Civil Liberties Union from 1975 to 1992, Halperin focused on government secrecy and the Freedom of Information Act. He played a key role in the enactment of the 1974 amendments to the FOIA over President Ford’s objections and was deeply engaged in subsequent efforts to expand and protect the FOIA. In his writings he developed the idea of a balancing test to determine whether information should remain classified and lobbied to have the concept included in the Carter administration’s Executive Order on Classification.

While serving on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton administration he played a key role in developing the Clinton executive order which partially restored the balancing-test provision and made other changes that reduced government secrecy. In the last years of the Clinton administration Halperin served as director of the policy planning staff at the State Department and was instrumental in the administration’s decision to declassify documents related to the Pinochet period in Chile on an expedited basis and under a stricter standard than contained in the executive order.

Charles Hinkle founded the security review and freedom of information directorate in the office of the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon’s principal Freedom of Information Act office. Under his leadership, the Pentagon drafted its first directives for implementing the 1966 FOI Act, which called for “maximum feasible disclosure” of information requested by journalists or the public.

A 1933 graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, Hinkle was a news reporter before World War II. After serving in the U.S. Army, he transferred to the U.S. Air Force as a public-affairs officer. He was named head of what became the Pentagon’s FOIA office upon his retirement from the Air Force in 1961. His pioneer work on FOIA was recognized by the law’s author, the late Rep. Jack Brooks, who cited DOD during Hinkle’s tenure as a “model agency” in implementation of the statute.

Hinkle retired in 1984 but worked thereafter as a consultant to DOD on declassification issues. In his obituary, The Washington Post cited him as the person “who opened up more U.S. military records to the public than any other federal official,” and called him a “champion of disclosure.”

Charley Hinkle died in 2005.

Kathleen Kirby is an attorney with Wiley Rein & Fielding in Washington, D.C., and counsel to the Radio-Television News Directors Association. A former radio broadcaster, Kirby has been a strong advocate for the First Amendment rights of the electronic media, leading efforts to increase access to information and oppose content restrictions, for almost 20 years.

Kirby routinely assists radio and television news directors with state and local efforts to gain access to records, meetings, courts and other government information. She has championed efforts in numerous states to open courts to cameras and microphones, and has taken a lead role in working with federal lawmakers to move legislation that would open all federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to electronic coverage.

On behalf of RTNDA, Kirby was instrumental in persuading the Court to release audiotapes at the conclusion of the historic oral argument in Bush v. Gore. She is working with representatives from numerous journalism organizations on federal legislative efforts to strengthen FOIA and create a federal shield law.

Kirby is a frequent author and lecturer on the legal aspects of newsgathering and First Amendment values. She discusses legal developments affecting FOI, free press and free speech in “Legal Notes,” a monthly column for RTNDA’s Communicator magazine, and created RTNDA’s online state-by-state guide to cameras in the courtroom. She wrote Keeping It Legal: A Media Law Handbook for the Newsroom, a practical reference guide for news managers facing FOI and other legal issues.

She is also vice chair of the board of directors for the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va.

Susan B. Long is a faculty member at Syracuse University in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management and co-founder and co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In addition to teaching managerial statistics and research methods at Syracuse, she has spent her professional career in the trenches using the Freedom of Information Act to provide public access to electronic records and administrative database systems to assess the performance of government.

Her active work on freedom of information matters began in 1970 when she and her husband, the late Phil Long, began a decadelong FOIA effort to reform entrenched secrecy practices at the Internal Revenue Service. During the ’80s her FOIA work continued when she became director of the Center for Tax Studies at Syracuse University.

In 1989, with David Burnham, she founded TRAC to make available comprehensive information on federal enforcement, staffing and spending. The information — much of it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act — consists of more than a terabyte of data, the equivalent of about 500 million printed pages. TRAC makes this available through its public Web site, and via a subscription service.

Long earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Washington with a dual major in statistics and criminology. She completed post-doctoral work in statistics at Princeton University. Her current research focuses upon data architecture, reliability and validity issues in database systems, and the design of data-mining and -analysis tools for non-statisticians.