‘Rogue activist’ Russ Kick meets maker
>>On the eve of the US-led invasion
of Iraq in March 2003, the Pentagon banned media coverage of the return of the remains of dead soldiers to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
By November, as the death toll rose, Russ Kick, a self-taught expert at digging up information, filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all the images of coffins arriving at Dover since the war began.
His request was rejected. The military said the ban was intended to protect the privacy of the dead; critics called it a political manoeuvre to sanitise the war. True to form, Kick did not take no for an answer and filed an appeal. “I figured I was tilting at windmills,” he told The New York Times in 2004.
But in April 2004, by which time more than 830 Americans had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, his request was granted. Kick received hundreds of photographs, mostly of flag-draped coffins, which he posted on his website.
They quickly found their way to television and the front pages of newspapers around the world, bringing home the human cost of the conflict and touching off a national debate about the use of emotionally charged images in wartime.
Kick, a star in the world of activist researchers, was renowned for using the Freedom of Information Act to exquisite effect. He spent two decades publishing tens of thousands of pages of government files, court documents, corporate memos, scientific studies and covert-action reports, all part of a lifelong mission to hold authorities and institutions accountable.
He died on Sept 12 at his home in Tucson, Arizona, at 52. His sister, Ruth Kick, confirmed the death but declined to identify the cause.
A self-described “rogue transparency activist” and “investigative archivist,” Kick worked on his own, without institutional support, and posted his findings on his website. He initially called the site the Memory Hole in honour of the disposal chute through which the authorities in George Orwell’s 1984 destroyed embarrassing documents; it ultimately became Altgov2.org.
One of his most notable postings involved an internal Justice Department report, written in 2002, that criticised departmental efforts at diversity hiring. Officials released a heavily redacted version; Kick downloaded the report, highlighted the black redaction bars and deleted them, making the original text instantly visible.
He was among the first to post documents in full, including all 16,000 pages of the FBI’s file on Martin Luther King Jr (The agency had released only a fraction of them.)
“The work he was doing was phenomenal,” David Cuillier, a University of Arizona professor who studies government transparency and public-records access, said. “He showed that anybody in this country could get public records out of the government, even when the government didn’t want to give them out.”
But Kick’s life’s work went way beyond digging up documents. Sceptical by nature and mistrustful of authority, he also produced guides and books that punctured myths, with in-your-face titles such as 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know (2003) and You Are Being Lied To (2001), updated in 2009 as You Are Still Being Lied To.
Despite the aggressive nature of his work and the bold imperatives of his book titles, Kick in person was soft-spoken and introverted. An intellectual, a bibliophile and a relentless seeker of knowledge, he was a writer and anthologist who immersed himself in classic literature, cuisine, quotations, the visual arts, mysticism, old-school daiquiris and, more recently, the treatment of animals.
“I can’t focus completely on any one thing for too long,” he wrote on his website. “My personal brand is a mess.”
Russell Charles Kick III was born July 20, 1969, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he spent his youth. His mother, Jane (Woody) Kick, was an executive assistant and later a homemaker. His father, Russell Charles Kick II, became chair of the department of accounting
and finance at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville; Russ enrolled there, majoring in psychology, and graduated in 1991.
A brief early marriage, to Kimberly Gannon, ended in divorce. Kick is survived by his sister and his mother. As a youth, Kick vacuumed up information. His sister said they grew up surrounded by books.
He also studied how to design websites and design books. “He was a true polymath,” Michael Ravnitzky, a public-records researcher and a friend of Kick’s, said. Kick, he added, was “interested in every subject under the sun, hunting down factual information and fictional expression across the range of human existence.”