-- "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story"

One of our main goals in this newsroom is to make full and thorough use of two laws intended to make government as transparent as possible.

One is the Maryland Public Information Act; the other the federal Freedom of Information Act (or as we jargonishly call them, PIA and FOIA, pronounced "foy-ah").

Under these acts, the public -- that's right, anyone -- can make a request to government to reveal anything considered public information.

Ever wondered what your state representative was using his or her e-mail account for? Under the PIA, under Maryland state law, that's considered public.

Your Uncle Jim just died and you know he had a criminal background, but the family never talked about it? Use the FOIA and you can get a copy of his FBI file. No kidding. You can even get your own, if you're brave enough.

Our FOIA hound in the newsroom is City Editor Rob Walters, who has set a goal that each year we make at least 100 FOIA requests for federal records.

(That's a goal we achieved this year and last. I'll leave it to a future column by Rob to elucidate more on that.)

Using public information requests is a hit-or-miss business, especially at the federal level, where requests can be denied for the oddest reasons and the rules are used to skirt transparency.

For instance, reporter Justin Palk asked for a USAMRIID phone directory. The request was honored, but when he got the directory, every name and phone number was redacted -- blacked out -- even the ones we already knew the number for.

So, I was heartened to see that one of President Barack Obama's first actions was a day one executive order telling all executive departments and agencies that if there was any question whether to honor a FOIA request, to do so:

"In the face of doubt, openness prevails. The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears. Nondisclosure should never be based on an effort to protect the personal interests of Government officials at the expense of those they are supposed to serve."

The order is part of an effort to "usher in a new era of open Government," according to the letter.

Accordingly, the president has directed the attorney general to issue new guidelines governing the FOIA to executive department heads and agencies. Obama also ordered the director of the Office of Management and Budget to update agencies' guidance and increase information provided to the public, "including through the use of new technologies."

One can only hope that means using the Internet to provide electronic copies. Most of the requests we send have to be written in a formal letter and snail-mailed. If we get the records, they come back on paper.

This is especially a problem for state and local governments. I remember in 2005, during a probe into Maryland Gov. Bob Ehrlich's hiring and firing practices, staffers wheeling into the State House press pit a flatbed trolley stacked with 14,000 pages of photocopies. They came on a Friday afternoon, after a request to review e-mail records made under the PIA by several news agencies.

It's my suspicion they didn't provide electronic copies in an effort to discourage the request by jacking up the cost of retrieving and copying the records (I remember it being somewhere around the $35,000 mark).

Not that that would ever happen in local government.

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Now, the executive order from Obama could all be nice-sounding political rhetoric. Many government agencies are notoriously and sadly reluctant to err on the side of openness, as some of the results of our requests have shown us.

But it is refreshing to see at least lip service paid to the notion of openness, transparency, and the accountability that inevitably promises to follow. And it gives us something to send along with our next 100 requests, just as a hint É

Clifford G. Cumber is an assistant city editor at The Frederick News-Post. He can be reached at 240-215-8606 or ccumber@newspost.com.