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Russ Kick, ‘Rogue Transparency Activist,’ Is Dead at 52

posted by martyb on Wednesday October 20 2021, @02:16AM   
from the R.I.P. dept.

takyon writes:

Russ Kick, 'Rogue Transparency Activist,' Is Dead at 52

A self-described "rogue transparency activist" and "investigative archivist," Mr. Kick worked on his own, without institutional support, and posted his findings on his website. He initially called the site the Memory Hole, in honor of the disposal chute through which the authorities in George Orwell's "1984" destroyed embarrassing documents; it ultimately became Altgov2.org.

One of his most notable postings involved an internal Justice Department report, written in 2002, that criticized departmental efforts at diversity hiring. Officials released a heavily redacted version; Mr. Kick downloaded the report, highlighted the black redaction bars and deleted them, making the original text instantly visible.

He was among the first to post documents in full, including all 16,000 pages of the F.B.I.'s file on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (The agency had released only a fraction of them.)

"The work he was doing was phenomenal," David Cuillier, a University of Arizona professor who studies government transparency and public-records access, said in an interview. "He showed that anybody in this country could get public records out of the government, even when the government didn't want to give them out."

But Mr. Kick's life's work went way beyond digging up documents.

Skeptical by nature and mistrustful of authority, he also produced guides and books that punctured myths, with in-your-face titles like "50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know" (2003) and "You Are Being Lied To" (2001), updated in 2009 as "You Are Still Being Lied To."

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Original Submission

• declined to identify the cause declined to identify the cause (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @02:22AM (4 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @02:22AM (#1188664)

  Always good cause for suspicion. Or to milk the conspiracy theorists

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• Re:declined to identify the cause Re:declined to identify the cause (Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday October 20 2021, @05:49AM (1 child)

  by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Wednesday October 20 2021, @05:49AM (#1188692)

  Maybe he disguised himself as a bucket and instantly died as a result.

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  • Re:declined to identify the cause (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @07:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @07:06AM (#1188704)

    I thought he just set his opacity slider to 0%.

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• Re:declined to identify the cause Re:declined to identify the cause (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @04:05PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 20 2021, @04:05PM (#1188798)

  Yeah, 52 is old enough to have a heart attack; but young enough for it to be "too soon". Saying this as someone who is about the same age...

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  • Re:declined to identify the cause (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @06:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21 2021, @06:47PM (#1189316)

    >> Yeah, 52 is old enough to have a heart attack

    Absolutely. 40 year-old son of family close to us, in decent shape, died 10 years back of a heart attack. If you've got a genetic predisposition, as I understand it you're fairly screwed, even with meds / interventions.

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