Considering the amount of data governments produce, compelling them to publish all of it would be counterproductive as citizens would be swamped.  It is a misnomer in many things that more is necessarily better but that is, perhaps, more true of information than of most things. Public bodies produce vast quantities of data and are often have a greater tendency to maintain copious records than their private sector equivalents. US government agencies will create data that would require “20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text,” over the next two years. [i] Simply dumping this en masse would be a fairly effective way of masking any information that a public body wanted kept hidden. Deliberately poor referencing would achieve the same result. This ‘burying’ of bad news at a time when everyone is looking somewhere else is one of the oldest tricks in press management. For example Jo Moore, an aide to then Transport Secretary Stephen Byers suggested that September 11 2001 was “a very good day to get out anything we want to bury.” Suggesting burying a u turn on councillors’ expenses. [ii]  For it to genuinely help with the transparency and accountability of public agencies it would require inordinately detailed and precise cataloguing and indexing – a process that would be likely to be both time consuming and expensive. The choice would, therefore, be between a mostly useless set of data that would require complex mining by those citizens who were keen to use it or the great expense of effectively cataloguing it in advance. Even this latter option would defeat the objective of greater accountability because whoever had responsibility for the cataloguing would have far greater control of what would be likely to come to light.  Instead ensuring a right of access for citizens ensures that they can have a reasonable access to exactly the piece of information they are seeking [iii] .  [i] Eddy, Nathan, ‘Big Data Still a Big Challenge for Government IT’, eweek, 8th May 2012,   [ii] Sparrow, Andrew, ‘September 11: ‘a good day to bury bad news’’, The Telegraph, 10 October 2001,   [iii] Freedom of Information as an Internationally Protected Human Right. Toby Mendel, Head of Law at Article 19.