"Secrecy, the secrecy system and the pseudo secrecy system in the United States have gone out of control," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

In light of Sunshine Week, begun in 2005 as a national event to promote the right of citizen's to know, March 12 -- 18 this year celebrates the right to access information.

Controversy, said Blanton, speaking at The Brookings Institution in Washington DC, is currently shrouding briefs to the president.

According to the 9/11 Commission, the country would have been safer if the document President George W. Bush received about the impending attack had been allowed into public view, said Blanton.

"Even Donald Rumsfeld's own Pentagon admits that 50 percent of what's classified shouldn't be classified," he said.

According to Blanton, governments hide information to keep the public in the dark "because they're better off when they're in the dark, we're not.

"We as American have a lot to learn about pushing back, from other countries," said Blanton.

"This is about power and having the tools to control power," said Tania Sanchez, coordinator for the Transparency Project in Mexico.

Citing federal information laws implemented in June 2003, people can now actively request government information in Mexico, she said.

"Analysts and scholars are pointing to transparency as being one of the most significant acts during the term of the current administration," under President Vicente Fox, said Sanchez.

As a challenge still being worked out, groups are pushing for the constitutionalization of the provision of freedom of information in Mexico.

"A political challenge is to sustain what we have achieved," Sanchez said. "We can expect different backlashes.

According to Aruna Roy, founder of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and a member of the Indian National Advisory Council, there are many similarities between problems faced in the American state of Illinois and the Indian state of Rajasthan.

"This world is shrinking," she said, "information is power and people who wield power know that sharing it is loss of power."

Discussing her experience in fighting for freedom of information rights for the working class population in India, the most important means of making a democracy work is to ask questions and create places of dissent, she said.

"Secrecy is anti-democratic," said Roy, and quoting the motto of her organization, the MKSS, a grassroots movement that triggered the debate for transparency in India, "the right to know is the right to live."

Nikhil Dey, co-founder and member of the MKSS with Roy, said international transparency still has a long way to go.

Citing the recent signing of the Bush-Singh nuclear agreement in India, "it is shrouded in secrecy," he said. "But we can start chipping away at both ends," in a bid to make the people of the United States and the people of India cooperate in learning more about the deal and its implications.

"Citizens need to take action to make sure we have a better world," he said.

International transparency will depend on the rest of the world, according to Anne Florini, senior fellow at Brookings. "There are clearly some cases where secrecy is valuable."

The public needs to take control and push for transparency even when private firms control information, said Florini.

This form of control has been seen more recently in Iraq, where the second largest allied force is not the British, but private contractors working for the Americans.

"How do you mobilize a transnational coalition to press international organizations like the World Bank on what they should or should not put into the public domain," said Alisdair Roberts, director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

"The United States exports its ideas about information control and secrecy, the whole package goes, for good or for ill," said Roberts.

In the early 1990s, the former Soviet bloc adopted Freedom of Information laws and in the late 1990s, they adopted secrecy laws -- directly correlated to those already existing in the United States.

If you want to join international organizations such as NATO, you have to craft your laws on a model similar to those in the United States, said Roberts.

Today, it is guessed that about 65 countries around the world have adopted similar legislation as the American Freedom of Information Act. This will continue to raise new issues and questions, he said.

"The preoccupation with governability is going to be with us even after the Bush administration is replaced," said Roberts.

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