Pennsylvanians have reason to celebrate during Sunshine Week; we're entering the third year of the new Right-To-Know Law, which finally allowed us to look at reams of documents we pay to produce.

But the law is under attack by the public officials who were used to operating in secrecy. Usually they argue they're protecting privacy. But the changes they suggest would actually shield them from accountability. Take House Bill 364, for example, introduced by Rep. RoseMarie Swanger, currently being reviewed by the House State Government Committee. It would exempt public officials' home addresses from public disclosure.

That would have made it a lot harder for folks to realize that the woman who crashed her car early one morning while driving drunk with pot and pills in her car in Columbia County was actually a school teacher on her way to work. Unless folks know their public officials personally, it would also make it difficult to recognize when a township supervisor uses borough crews to take care of his road before anybody else's, or an employee gets special consideration when the government buys his flood-prone house, or the borough zoning officer lives in a building that violates numerous codes.

Then there's House Bill 298, introduced by Rep. Robert Godshall and now in the House Judiciary Committee. It would ban the release of coroners' photos, videos or audio records. Supporters say this would protect families from the pain of having unscrupulous people publish gory photos of their loved ones. They don't mention this has never happened in Pennsylvania, nor do they mention the bill would prevent even the families of the deceased from looking at that material. The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association has examples of families who disagreed with coroners' determination that their loved ones committed suicide, and needed all the information from the autopsy to bolster their arguments.

The bill also ignores the work of the late Pete Shellem, of the Patriot-News, who used information from autopsies to help free four people wrongly convicted of murder.

Senate Bill 247, now in the Senate State Government Committee and introduced by Sen. Dominic Pileggi, would exempt public employees' W-2 forms from public release. The law already allows the state to redact Social Security numbers from such documents. Since public employees work for the public, shouldn't we, their employers, have access to how much they made and other information that determines what we pay in taxes?

Then there's the perennial argument against releasing dates of birth in public documents. Those who want to close the records say doing so will protect public employees from identity theft. What it really would do is prevent public employees from being identified. There are three men in Pennsylvania named Kenneth Ruffing, according to WhitePages.com. The date of birth in court papers helped reporters recognize that the man caught driving with a blood-alcohol content of .346 percent in 2006 was then-state Rep. Kenneth Ruffing, of the Pittsburgh area. By the same token, I and 56 other people in Pennsylvania have the name Susan Schwartz. If one of the other 56 gets arrested, I'd like my neighbors to know for certain she isn't me. There's an old saying: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Pennsylvania's Right-To-Know Law is much better than it used to be, but we can't afford to let down our guard.