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Web disclosures on rise
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December 18, 1997: 6:16 p.m. ET
House posts tobacco documents online, on time; rebuff to skeptics
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - When it comes to freedom of information, the public's appetite for full disclosure can border on the insatiable.
Yet even the most zealous truth-seeker might have balked at the 33 million tobacco industry documents squirreled away in warehouses in Minneapolis and London, awaiting a court-mandated unveiling.
Enter the Internet, and its ability to bring all the nitty-gritty of alleged public and private malfeasance to a single user-friendly Web site. A site like the House Commerce committee's.
That's the address where the House Commerce Committee posted a select cache of more than 800 -- or about 1.5 percent -- of the incriminating tobacco documents Thursday. The committee's Republican chairman, Thomas Bliley, obtained the documents by congressional subpoena two weeks ago.
The release of the documents came nearly six months after the U.S. tobacco industry agreed to pay $368 billion in a landmark settlement with anti-tobacco litigators in 39 states.
In dumping them on the Web, the committee joined a growing parade of government agencies that are seizing on cyberspace as their pulpit of choice for public disclosure.
Among the recent government-sponsored Internet highlights are sites on "Gulf War syndrome", published by the Defense Department; a Department of Energy Web page exploring radiation experiments on humans during World War II; and a State Department site probing the hot-button topic of Nazi gold.
Bliley had promised to make the tobacco documents public before Christmas. Their cyber-release Thursday went off without a technical hitch.
The documents, nestled in the Commerce Committee's blue-bordered homepage, popped online sharply at 10 a.m. -- the House's self-imposed deadline. It featured a pixellated image of Virginia Republican Thomas Bliley serenely leading his committee colleagues through a tobacco hearing last month.
The posting had been anxiously awaited by those who viewed it as a test-case for Internet efficiency in the wake of a much-publicized recent failure. In November, a temporary power outage at a Web server delayed the much-hyped online release of a judge's verdict in the Massachusetts murder trial of British nanny Louise Woodward.
By the time the verdict came online, most media watchers already had gotten the news through more conventional channels.
Jonah Seiger, a Washington, D.C.-based Internet consultant, called the Woodward snafu an "unfortunate fluke."
"Because of the Woodward case and all the hype surrounding it, when [the system] didn't work, it gave fodder to skeptics and critics for something to point to and say the Internet was not up to snuff," Seiger said. "But 99.9 percent of the time, it works beautifully."
And relatively flawlessly. For every Woodward case, proponents say, there are countless success stories.
These range from Buckingham Palace's online mourning site for Princess Diana, to NASA's riveting dispatch of images of lunar moon rocks and sandy Martian plains to the computer screens of armchair astronauts.
Kathleen Edwards, the manager of the Freedom of Information Center in Columbia, Mo., said the benefits from the broader public exposure afforded by the Internet far outweigh any technical speed bumps.
"I don't see any immediate problem with it," Edwards said.
The ease of access, however, may belie hidden hazards, say some. Robert Fabricant, a Web designer with Radical Media, believes that unsavvy net surfers may get snagged by self-proclaimed purveyors of truth.
"One of the trickiest things about the Web is figuring out what's up," said Fabricant. "The normal way we are used to receiving a document is in a printed journal, where there is a clearer sense of accountability."
He added: "One of the things you have to watch out for is the way that knowledge proliferates online. People can take these documents and copy them. I think it's very important that in some way there be some integrity to a [site] address.
"Because if I do a search in a search engine I might hit 1,000 other addresses and that may not be the official sponsor of that material. You have to remind people that there is one place where you can go and get the primary source of info you are looking for."
The tobacco documents were painstakingly scanned by staff members, in their original form, directly onto the web site. By mid-day, more than 70,000 visitors had logged on to the site.
John Reed, a Dallas-based provider of Internet services with Source Media, said disseminating too much information over the Web could be counterproductive.
"If it is not appropriate to be publicly posted on a telephone pole, it should not be posted on the Web," he said. "It's simply a broader delivery process. The Web has become a very efficient medium…but as policy gels, there's certainly a potential for selective disclosure."
But Henry Miller, a trial lawyer with Clark, Gagliardi and Miller who has specialized in tobacco issues, sees no drawbacks in unfettered online access to reams of public documents like the tobacco industry's.
"In old days," he said, "corporate defendants would give you the keys to a warehouse and you'd go in there with three paralegals and in five days you'd come out with three files. [Internet releases] are a help because now you can really try to zoom into the documents that you need."
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