Each year during Sunshine Week, which began March 13, advocates of open government take the measure of the Freedom of Information Act.

Student volunteers ask local police and other agencies for various records the public unquestionably has a legal right to see. Usually, they're met with some hostile refusals, unwarranted delays, and bureaucratic wooden-headedness—offset by instances of cheerful, professional compliance with the open records law.

In the same vein, the Yale Law School clinic which focuses on government transparency conducted an ambitious year-long experiment that has just been published. It targets a looming topic that stubbornly eludes FOI accountability: algorithms—the computer formulas that are increasingly used to help make governmental decisions.