New park policy shuts public out

"A visitor was hurt after falling into Avalanche Gorge, prompting a 14-hour rescue effort by Glacier National Park rangers."

What visitor? A man? A woman? Was the visitor 5 years old or 65? Was the visitor from Kalispell or from Oklahoma?

Newspapers and other media are not in the business of publishing mystery stories, but that's apparently what the National Park Service - and specifically Glacier National Park - would like to see.

Glacier has long had a policy of transparency when it comes to releasing information on incidents that occur within park boundaries.

Not any more.

Under a new policy, Glacier officials will not release the names, ages or hometowns of people who are hurt or die on Glacier's public lands. What the media, and the public, can now expect is nothing more than fuzzy reports from the park. Incidents in Glacier will be a guessing game to be settled by the rumor mill.

The Daily Inter Lake, and others in the media, strenuously object to the park's establishment of a heretofore unknown "right to privacy" on public lands.

The policy is derived from a ruling issued last year by a lowly appeals officer in Washington, D.C. Why an appeals officer's opinion carries so much weight is beyond us, particularly when an attorney for the Montana Freedom of Information Act Hotline tells us that there is a "legion" of case law supporting the opposite position regarding privacy rights on public lands.

What's especially obtuse about the ruling is that it is derived from the "Freedom of Information Act," not the "Secrecy of Information Act." FOIA, as it is known, has served as the public's legal lever to pry information out of the government. It is not a law for locking information up, and though it acknowledges privacy rights, it directly requires government agencies to balance "the individual's right to privacy against the public's right to disclosure."

For decades, the National Park Service and other agencies have wisely tended to favor the public's right.

It's pretty obvious that when people die or get hurt on public lands, or waters, the agency in charge should be entirely forthcoming about what happened and who was involved. That's the whole idea of it being "public" land. It belongs to all of us, and what happens there is the business of all of us.

What if there is a shooting or a serious assault in Glacier? Will the victim's name be withheld? Why? When Vice President Cheney shot a friend in a hunting accident, the world demanded to know who it was (and that happened on private land!). That's because our most valuable defense against government chicanery is independent access to the facts. By losing access to the "victim" we also lose the ability to confirm what the government is telling us. That opens up too much chance of the "official story" starting to veer away from the facts.

Likewise, there is the matter of accountability.

Glacier rescue efforts are often elaborate, dangerous and expensive, sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars. But the person who is the focus of those efforts will now have a right to remain anonymous, and the public will be clueless as to what might have really happened.

What if the person broke laws or regulations, endangering park rangers and costing taxpayers thousands? It's not clear whether the park would still protect the identities of such people, but the manner in which Glacier is now leaning suggests they may also be considered "victims."

This new park policy is wrongheaded, and someday we hope it will be proven to be illegal as well.