Russ Kick, writer, editor and 'rogue transparency activist,' dies at 52

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Mon Sep 27, 2021, 02:21 PM - Edit history (1)

Russ Kick, the writer, editor and self-described "rogue transparency activist," died earlier this month at 52. He used FOIA requests to pry loose government records and edited "The Graphic Canon," which reimagined works of literature as comics

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Russ Kick, writer, editor and ‘rogue transparency activist,’ dies at 52
He used FOIA requests to pry loose government records. He also edited “The Graphic Canon,” a book series that reinterpreted literary works as comics and visual art.
washingtonpost.com

Obituaries

Russ Kick, writer, editor and ‘rogue transparency activist,’ dies at 52

By Harrison Smith
September 24, 2021 at 10:29 p.m. EDT

Russ Kick, a writer, editor and self-described “rogue transparency activist” who pried loose government records, using Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain overlooked documents and peek behind the curtain of official secrecy, died Sept. 12 at his home in Tucson. He was 52. ... His sister, Ruth Kick, did not give a cause but said he had been in poor health for more than a decade.

{snip}

Working largely on his own, without institutional support, Mr. Kick filed FOIA requests to obtain documents related to U.S. biological and chemical warfare programs, U.S. Border Patrol facilities, animal experimentation and a host of other issues. “Oftentimes it was those mundane requests that would be a critical resource years down the line,” said Michael Morisy, the co-founder and chief executive of MuckRock, a nonprofit news site where Mr. Kick had worked the past two years.

In an email interview, he added that Mr. Kick was “omnipresent” in the FOIA community, “the person you’d turn to every time there was a question about document arcana or the ins-and-outs of obscure filings.” Mr. Kick was also known as one of the first to regularly publish original documents in full, rather than to simply share quotes or transcriptions, according to Washington Post FOIA director Nate Jones.

{snip}

Mr. Kick started publishing documents in earnest in 2002, on a website he called the Memory Hole. Its name was a kind of reverse homage to the incinerator used to destroy embarrassing government files in George Orwell’s “1984.” (In later years, he created the websites Memory Hole 2 and AltGov2 to share his work.)

{snip}

By Harrison Smith
Harrison Smith is a reporter on The Washington Post's obituaries desk. Since joining the obituaries section in 2015, he has profiled big-game hunters, fallen dictators and Olympic champions. He sometimes covers the living as well, and previously co-founded the South Side Weekly, a community newspaper in Chicago. Twitter https://twitter.com/harrisondsmith

[blogslug]

1. Damn

The Memory Hole was brilliant. DisInfo was great. Terrible loss.

[7wo7rees]

2. RIP Russ

Disinfo is where my first email address was generated. I read his websites and bought his books.

Rest in peace Russ.

[Hekate]

3. KnR