Ten years into the 20th century, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a book titled “Other People’s Money.” In it, he argued that transparency in the nation’s financial markets was vital to guard against market fraud. In the book, he wrote: “Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant (and) electric light the best policeman.”

The advice to disinfect and protect the market was ignored by Congress until after the stock market crashed in 1929. Only then did Washington adopt disclosure-based regulatory practices for U.S. financial markets.

It took decades more for Congress to enact public access laws to guarantee transparency in government, and freedom of information advocates immediately adopted Brandeis’ words as their slogan.

“Government is,” as Charles Davis of the National Freedom of Information Coalition said, only “as transparent as the people make it.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission is the regulator for financial markets, but we, the people, are regulators of government and how it conducts our business. We have an absolute right to know what our elected and appointed officials are doing as they represent us.

The press certainly plays a part in this watchdog role, and an important one. But the lead players are citizens.

The press uses public information laws as tools to conduct its business; the public uses these laws to guarantee government will act in our best interest. Hard not to sound cynical, but our government can and has acted badly behind closed doors and, without sunshine beaming down to expose bad behavior, government will continue to do so. Citizens have more than a right to keep the shades open, they have an obligation to do so.

It’s an obligation Americans appear to be embracing.

According to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, an overwhelming proportion of the public records requests it receives are filed by citizens, a pattern duplicated in other state agencies and across the country.

For instance, of the 72 FOI requests processed by the DEP’s FOI compliance officer since early 2005, 67 were filed by lawyers, individuals, businesses and environmental groups. The remaining five requests were filed by journalists.

The Department of Health and Human Services received 60 FOI requests last year; only 10 were from journalists.

Every agency in the state could offer up similar statistics.

One explanation is that journalists have pretty good luck picking up the telephone and asking for records or objecting to closed meetings because it’s part of the daily routine in newsrooms, and that may reduce the number of written FOI requests.

But the real explanation is that Americans have a real sense of ownership of government. We select politicians at the polls and we ask them to propose and pass laws on our behalf and are then rooted to those results.

This is Sunshine Week in the United States, the second annual awareness campaign to highlight the importance of public access and open meetings laws. If you’re not familiar with Maine’s Freedom of Access Act and the guarantees and protections it provides, this is a good time to learn what rights you have to access government and what responsibilities government has to respond. As the sole regulators of transparent government, if we don’t do it, no one will.