Russ Roberts was a first-generation FOIA officer who helped set a tone that encouraged government agencies to maximize disclosure under the new Freedom of Information Act and to view disclosure of government information to the public as the role of the FOIA officer and staff.

Roberts came to his job as chief FOIA officer at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) with a background as a journalist and public-affairs officer. At that time, in the late 1960s, agencies were frequently disdainful of FOIA, but Roberts quickly embraced the spirit and intent of FOIA. Throughout his career, he pursued policies at his agency that encouraged disclosure of information and removed bureaucratic and political barriers.

He pioneered the concept of contacting requesters whenever necessary to clarify requests. Along with several colleagues, he was instrumental in creating the American Society of Access Professionals, an organization that allowed agency FOIA staff and outsiders interested in FOIA and privacy to establish a career path for such personnel.

Roberts retired as FOIA officer at HHS in 1989 and continued to work with ASAP and other organizations to promote FOIA in the United States and abroad until his death.

As a senior executive at the Department of Energy, Bryan Siebert led perhaps the federal government’s largest review of classification policy in the last 50 years as part of then-Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s “Openness Initiative.”

The goal of the initiative, which occurred from 1993 to 2000, was to peel back unnecessary secrecy by revising the department’s classification practices. Also participating in the review were the departments of Defense and State and the CIA, as well as the French and British governments. At Siebert’s direction, public meetings were held across the nation, allowing citizens to express their views about classification and declassification. The Openness Initiative, of which Siebert was a driving force, resulted in the careful declassification of large amounts of material, which were made available to the public on the Internet and at four press conferences.

Siebert also directed the development of procedures to speed up and make more accurate the redaction of classified documents to make the Department of Energy more responsive to FOIA requests.

He retired from the federal government in 2002.

David Sobel has served as senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation since 2006.  He was a co-founder and general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC (1994-2006). He was formerly counsel to the National Security Archive (1986-88) and an associate at Dobrovir, Oakes & Gebhardt (1983-86), one of Washington’s first public-interest law firms.

Since 1982, Sobel has litigated dozens of Freedom of Information Act cases for a variety of clients, including ABC News, the U.S. Student Association, the Fund for Constitutional Government, the Nation magazine, Coretta Scott King, former Ambassador Kenneth Rush, and numerous public-interest organizations.

Sobel’s cases have sought disclosure of information concerning the USA Patriot Act, the Total Information Awareness program and the privacy impact of aviation-security measures and other homeland-security initiatives.  Among other issues, he has litigated numerous cases involving expedited processing of FOIA requests seeking disclosure of time-sensitive information relating to ongoing public debates around controversial government activities.

He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Florida College of Law. He is a member of the Bar of the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court and several federal Courts of Appeals.

(Updated April 2025)

Thomas M. Susman

Thomas M. Susman is the Strategic Advisor to the American Bar Association’s Center for Global Programs and Governmental Affairs Office after serving as director of the ABA’s Governmental Affairs Office in Washington for a decade.

Before assuming that position in May 2008, he was a partner in the Washington office of Ropes & Gray for over 25 years, where his practice emphasized government relations, antitrust, and information and privacy law. Before joining Ropes & Gray, he served on Capitol Hill as chief counsel and general counsel to the Antitrust and Administrative Practice Subcommittees and to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Prior to that he was in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice after clerking for Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge John Minor Wisdom in New Orleans.

Susman has been involved in counseling, litigation, and lobbying involving access to government information and privacy, and he frequently has advised clients on issues relating to access to commercial information. His experience with the Freedom of Information Act began at the DOJ with advising agencies on implementing the new statute in 1968, and while counsel in the Senate he was pivotal in the development of the 1974 FOIA amendments.

He testified on FOIA reform proposals before the U.S. Congress in the 1980s, 1990s, and in 2005, and wrote a number of works on information and privacy, including the 2005 BNA Portfolio “Business Uses of FOIA.” He has taught classes and courses on FOIA to government lawyers, government access professionals, and law students. He has represented clients pro bono in FOIA cases against the CIA, State Department, and Commerce Department. He also has consulted with governments and civil society organizations on access to information in China, Argentina, Chile, the Czeck Republic, and the European Union.

Susman has been recognized for his work in championing the public’s right to know. In 2009, he received the American Library Association’s James Madison Award, and in 2008, he was awarded the inaugural Robert Vaughn FOIA Legend Award by the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University Washington College of Law. He serves on the board of the National Freedom of Information Coalition and POGO’s OpenTheGovernment, and he is Founding President and on the Board of the D.C. Open Government Coalition.

Susman graduated from Yale University and received his J.D. from the University of Texas Law School.

(Updated April 2025)

Mark Tapscott is director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy and the foundation’s Marilyn and Fred Guardabassi Fellow. Tapscott — who was a Reagan administration political appointee before entering newspaper journalism — cultivates appreciation among conservatives in Congress and elsewhere of transparency and accountability as the best antidotes to the abuses of Big Government.

He has testified before both houses of Congress and helped mobilize bipartisan coalitions supporting FOIA reforms. His FOIA columns, features and op-eds have appeared in such newspapers as The Washington Post, Houston Chronicle and Hartford Courant, as well as Editor & Publisher, National Review Online, FoxNews.com and the Knight-Ridder-Tribune and Scripps Howard News Service national editorial wires.

Tapscott is also an active FOIA advocate in the blogosphere through his blog, Tapscott’s Copy Desk.

Steven Aftergood directed the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, where he was a leading practitioner of FOIA and a prominent critic of official secrecy.

A FOIA lawsuit brought by Aftergood in 1997 led to the declassification of the intelligence-budget total for the first time in 50 years. Through his popular e-mail newsletter Secrecy News, Aftergood has consistently provided insight into government secrecy policy to a growing audience in the press, government and the public.

He has worked to develop new channels of communication between government and the public to help compensate for the growth in official secrecy. Toward that end, Aftergood has published on the FASP Web site thousands of government records that have been suppressed, withdrawn, or are otherwise unavailable, including Congressional Research Service reports, scientific and historical studies, and assorted policy documents.

In 2006, Aftergood received the James Madison Award from the American Library Association and the Public Access to Government Information Award from the American Association of Law Libraries. He received the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award from the Playboy Foundation in 2004.

Aftergood retired from the Federation of American Scientists in 2021.

(Updated April 2025)

As the director of the FOI Service Center at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press until early in 2006, Rebecca Daugherty answered thousands of FOI questions from reporters every year.

She created the template for “Tapping Officials’ Secrets,” a guide to finding government information, and talked major open-government attorneys from across the country into “writing the book” on state open-government laws.

Daugherty regularly updated “How to Use the Federal FOI Act,” as well. Frequently an officer in the American Society of Access Professionals, including a stint as its president, she trained journalists and FOI officers on how FOI could be made to work better. She wrote comments on federal proposals that endorsed secrecy, answered questions from legislative staffs seeking to either open or close information and tracked open government foibles daily for various Reporters Committee projects.

She worked for more than a decade as an FOI specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, and brought to her FOI work experience as news reporter on the Columbia (Mo.) Daily Tribune and as a copy editor on the Metro-East Journal in East St. Louis, Ill.

Daugherty studied under the University of Missouri’s Hall of Famers Paul Fisher and the late dean, Earl English, who created the FOI Center at Missouri. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Missouri and a juris doctorate from the University of Missouri – Kansas City.

For Rep. William Donlon (Don) Edwards, D-Calif., adhering to the Bill of Rights was never an option, it was an obligation. During his service in the House of Representatives from 1963 to 1995, Edwards chaired the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights.

Edwards always believed that the public is entitled to know what its government is doing, and when his subcommittee received FBI oversight jurisdiction, Edwards — who was a special agent in the FBI in 1940 and 1941 — ordered a General Accounting Office audit of the Bureau’s investigative files. Despite strong FBI resistance, the GAO report revealed that fine recoveries in criminal cases had been enormously overstated, and that the FBI was actually making a profit.

Believing strongly that the FBI and other such agencies were restrained in their actions by the Constitution, Edwards helped to expose unlawful activities in the FBI’s program Cointelpro, which had actively pursued anti-war and civil rights groups such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

He also spoke critically of the FBI’s Library Awareness Program, which was an attempt to enlist librarians to report persons reading about materials deemed useful to terrorists. Edwards worked to bring about the end the House Un-American Activities Committee and was actively involved in the civil rights movement, in both public and private. He is retired and living in California.

Throughout his career and into his retirement, John Finnegan has been a champion of the right to know. After retiring from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, where he served as the senior vice president/assistant publisher until 1989, Finnegan became the president of the Minnesota Joint Media Committee, an organization founded to monitor FOI legislation in Minnesota and advocate open government to the state legislature.

Finnegan, along with a colleague, authored Minnesota’s first open-meetings law in 1957; he also drafted and lobbied for the Data Practices Act (1974), Minnesota’s first open-records legislation. Additionally, Finnegan has appeared numerous times before the Minnesota state Legislature to defend First Amendment rights, a topic he addressed along with FOI in columns at the Pioneer Press. He has also co-written a book, Law and the Media in the Midwest (1984).

For his distinguished FOI work, Finnegan has received several awards, including the Associated Press Managing Editors award for Defense of a Free Press in 1980 and the John Peter Zenger First Amendment award in 1986.

Finnegan served as the vice chairman of the American Society of Newspaper Editors FOI committee, chairman of the APME FOI committee, president of the First Amendment Congress, and Minnesota Newspaper Association legislative committee.

Although retired, Finnegan continues his work as an advocate for the freedom of information. He is currently combatting efforts by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to close drivers’ license data and change the Minnesota Data Practices Act to a presumption that all data are closed unless specifically opened.