THE CRACKDOWN ON civil liberties that followed the Sept. 11 attacks has reached into almost every part of American life – and one of the most dramatic casualties has been the public's right to monitor its government.

From Washington, D.C., where the attorney general has said he will help any federal agency fight any Freedom of Information Act request, to state and local governments across the nation, there's been a move to shut the door on public access. As Savannah Blackwell reports on page 17, 17 states are currently proposing to curtail the public's ability to review government documents and attend government meetings.

It's all part of what New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis calls the "War Without End." And, he noted March 9, "secrecy is a ... threat to the constitutional premise" of citizen control against unchecked governmental power.

California is no exception – as Rachel Brahinsky reports on page 20, at least eight bills have been introduced this year in the state legislature that would turn public records into secret files or would close off meetings of public agencies. In fact, the war on sunshine has been under way in this state for some time. Terry Francke, general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition (CFAC), says that California – once a national leader in open government – now has "about the dimmest level of sunshine of any state."

Years of adverse court decisions have eroded the protections of the Ralph M. Brown Act and the California Public Records Act. The powerful secrecy lobby – financed with your tax dollars (see "Paying for Secrecy," page 20) – has bitterly opposed every significant effort to improve the situation. And when open-government activists have managed to get reform bills through the legislature, governors of both parties have repeatedly vetoed them.

Several years ago, after a meeting of the CFAC board of directors in the office of media lawyer James Chadwick, the frustrated sunshine advocates were discussing the bleak situation. Chadwick offered a bold solution: a state constitutional amendment making access to government information a fundamental right of the public. With the support of the Society of Professional Journalists and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the measure finally found a sponsor: state senator John Burton (D-San Francisco) agreed this year to introduce it.

So SCA 7 is now before the legislature, and if it gets a two-thirds vote in both houses, it will be on the November ballot. The language of the measure is relatively simple, but the impact is far-reaching. If it passes, a person seeking government records will no longer have to demonstrate that the information is legally public. The government agency will have to either release it or prove that it meets a narrow, carefully crafted standard for allowable secrecy. The same would apply to government meetings.

It won't be easy to pass SCA 7. The bill will need widespread, bipartisan support – and it almost certainly will be up against the combined power of the taxpayer-funded groups that routinely battle open-government laws. Those groups include the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties, and the Association of California Water Agencies. None of those three have yet taken a position on the measure, but given their past records, it's unlikely they'll be inclined to support it.

However, those agencies are run and funded by the city councils, county supervisors, and water boards of the state – and there's no reason those local agencies can't tell their state associations to side with, not against, sunshine.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, for example, has already endorsed SCA 7. So the city's representative on the board of the League, Sup. Sophie Maxwell, needs to urge the group, on behalf of San Francisco, to lobby in favor of the bill. The same goes for CSAC (our representative is Sup. Leland Yee) and for ACWA (the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is a member).

The same goes for cities all over California: community activists should urge their local councils and supervisors not only to endorse the bill but also to push the big secrecy-lobby agencies to sign on to it. And with San Francisco as a model, every community in the state can pass a local sunshine ordinance, to address problems specific to that community.