Carl Malamud has taken it upon himself to see that all public information — from court decisions to financial disclosures to Army training tapes — is actually, well, public.

His art is in figuring out how to free documents that aren’t restricted by secrecy but by the fact that the government has failed to put them online.

It’s time for the government to catch up to technology. Creating free and easy access to court records, congressional hearings, and C-SPAN archives isn’t a partisan issue. But open access is a populist politics all its own, a challenge to the pay-to-play mentality that has allowed the financial world to leap so far ahead when it comes to information-sharing technologies.

“You see what they did with it,” Malamud says. “They drove our economy down. They stole all our money. This stuff can very much be used for evil, and it has been, often. The opportunity here is that it can now be used for different things.”