The Green Paper, alas, was just one indication of many big shots’ willingness to work against the citizenry. Again and again the denizens of Capitol Hill bragged about Americans being able to dial up the text of proposed legislation through a service called Thomas. And yet some Congress members still hoped to work out deals before the public saw the results on the Net. Friends of West Publishing used exactly such tactics on the Hill to try to reduce the amount of information that the government released for free. West and similar companies wanted to be able to profit off public data. So their congressional allies were hoping to cancel out the Freedom of Information Act in cases where federal contractors had created records. Any weakening of the act would make me _very_ grouchy; it had opened up many kind of government information for free or at affordable costs. I had benefited. Two decades ago the General Services Administration had tried unsuccessfully to charge me $20,000 to learn details about the government’s office-leasing program. Using this first-class muck, I had shown that then-Senator Abraham Ribicoff secretly owned a stake in a building that the GSA leased for the Central Intelligence Agency. I had learned, too, of a friend of Spiro Agnew who had been able to avoid building a half-million-dollar cafeteria required by the lease for the headquarters building of the Environmental Protection Agency. Because of the Information Act, I had been able to report both stories and get them out in the press and on network television. I had spent months camped out at the GSA, perusing documents; imagine what I could have done with a computer to ferret out digitized muck. And so I was dismayed to learn that some in Congress wanted to weaken the Information Act—this in an era when the Internet supposedly would open up Washington. If not fully Orwellian, such hypocrisy didn’t promote democratic alternatives to Big Brother. Uppity activists used the Net to thwart West at least for the moment. A bill introduced by Representative William Clinger, a Republican from Pennsylvania, was to be heard in a subcommittee and rushed through a committee edit in just a few days with West-friendly provisions. But James Love of the Taxpayer Assets Project caught wind of the shenanigans; Jim Warren pitched in with his own jeremiads in _Government Access_, his online newsletter; and furious Netfolks called and faxed the Hill. West may have really lost when the Republicans found out through the Internet about the firm’s generosity toward the _Democratic Party_, to which its executives gave far more than to the competition. “Why are we doing this?” the Republicans, in effect, may have wondered.