This post was co-written by Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, Sunlight's co-founders.

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 with one core idea: that when information about what our government is doing and who is trying to influence it is made broadly available on the Internet, we as individuals and as a society can better watch over our government, raise questions, root out corruption, highlight problems, elevate solutions, and in so doing, foster real government accountability and strengthen public faith in our institutions. While we have made much progress, we have a long way to go towards our goal of a government that is as transparent and accountable as possible.

We at Sunlight are transparency advocates. But we are not anti-secrecy per se. Information about private individuals and their private lives deserve to remain private. Some secrets about ongoing military operations and security activities should not be revealed to the public. Some debates over public policy can and should be done behind closed doors to allow for confidential negotiations as long as there is public review. But we strongly believe that information about the workings of government should, in general, be public. There should be fewer secrets, not more. Thus the current controversy over the non-profit Internet media organization, WikiLeaks, warrants that we speak out.

Thanks to the Internet, there is now a greater ability to shine light on the workings of government and other powerful actors. This democratization of watch-dogging is a profoundly good thing.  It must be vigorously protected against censors -- those who would prefer the public know less, not more, about what they are doing. More information, plus the Internet’s power to spread it beyond centralized control, may be our best defense against bad or illegal behavior.

WikiLeaks may be no more or less perfect than other media entities. Freedom of the press and of speech are often messy. But these rights are crucial, enshrined and protected as our most fundamental principles and practices.  The First Amendment is there to establish that it is not the job of the media in a democratic society to protect those in power from embarrassment or exposure. Thus, even when we are faced with what may we think of as “bad” press or speech, we must avoid responding with censorship -- the cure must not be worse than the disease.

If crimes have been committed in connection with the WikiLeaks experience, let the government make that case in court and let due process follow its course. But in the meantime, calls by some government leaders for the persecution of Julian Assange, or the extreme calls for his assassination, the intimidation of private internet service providers; the extra-legal freezing of WikiLeaks assets; and the blocking of the display of WikiLeaks-related information on government computers—even at the hallowed Library of Congress, where you can read all manner of subversive books—are affronts to an open society, a perversion of Internet activity, and a dagger aimed at the heart of the modern transparency movement.

The current reaction to WikiLeaks in the United States has exposed the vulnerability of any online publisher here to government pressure. This chilling effect on our democracy must be opposed.

In a reiteration of just about everything we cover here at Sunlight, Congressional Quarterly released a terrific article examining the many ways in which Congress is not transparent and open. If you read the blog here, or are familiar with Sunlight's work, these problems will be very familiar:

• Bills are often dropped hours before a vote. With no time to read the bills, large programs get voted on with little review from lawmakers and no review from the public. In one egregious case, lawmakers went scurrying for information on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, legalizing domestic spying programs, as the final version of the bill was not available when the vote was held.
• Some committees are secret, some are open. Sometimes a bill can travel through multiple committees with varying degrees of transparency.
• Conference committees are supposed to be open, but openness is often circumvented or multiple conferences are held, some open, some not.
• Congressional Research Service reports, the information pipeline for most congressional offices, are not widely, publicly available.
• There is a large amount of over-classification of legislative activities related to defense and intelligence.

And so it goes. Congress still has leaps and bounds to make towards true transparency. Over the past two years, there have been some encouraging developments including the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the rewriting of franking restrictions for lawmaker web use, and the voluntary transparency of some individual lawmakers.

One thing that does stand out in this article that needs to be challenged is the suggestion that transparency could cause greater disapproval of Congress:

Lawmakers in the 1970s reasoned that more openness could benefit not just voters, but Congress itself. That isn’t necessarily true, said Princeton’s Zelizer, thanks to 19th Century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s saying that the two things no one should want to see being made are sausage and legislation.

“It might not result in better ratings for Congress,” the professor said. “They thought, ‘If you make it more open, people will like it more.’ That actually didn’t happen.”

Zelizer, one of my favorite congressional experts, isn't wrong here, but his lessons don't necessarily apply to transparency as conceived of in the Internet-powered 21st century. While the reformers of the '60s and '70s did believe that openness would build trust with the public, they did not build interactivity and connectivity into that push for openness. Transparency, different from openness, proposes that information should not just be available and accessible, but that the public should be able to freely interact with both the information and all actors involved, including lawmakers, staffers, and other members of the general public. Unlike simply making information available, transparency would go a long way to help repair the image of Congress by actually connecting and involving citizens.

To see what this transparency could look like read my colleague Greg Elin's excellent review of the interactivity at change.gov, the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition web site.