Sunlight Is the Best Disinfectant

Corruption lives in the dark. Exposure is the cure, and it starts with ordinary people who keep records and refuse to look away.

2026-10-14 · Ho Chanh Nghia

I am angry, and I have been for a long time. Not at one person or one party, but at a pattern. Deals get made where nobody can see them. Regulators end up answering to the people they are supposed to watch. Middlemen get rich on other people’s money, and the people who earned that money are told the details are too complicated for them. I want to put that anger to use instead of just letting it out, and a lawyer who wrote more than a hundred years ago shows how.

What Brandeis actually wrote

In December 1913, Louis D. Brandeis, a Boston lawyer who later served on the U.S. Supreme Court, published an article in Harper’s Weekly called “What Publicity Can Do.” It opens like this:

“Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Note the words “is said to be.” Brandeis never claimed he invented the idea. He took a piece of common wisdom and made it a working principle. The article became Chapter V of his 1914 book, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.

His target was what people at the time called the “Money Trust”: a small group of bankers who controlled the flow of capital and charged heavy tolls for access to it. Congress’s Pujo Committee had just investigated that concentration of power. Brandeis gave the investigation credit, in language a soldier will recognize:

“The battlefield has been surveyed and charted. The hostile forces have been located, counted and appraised. That was a necessary first step—and a long one—towards relief.”

A first step, not a victory. He then laid out the next one: “Compel bankers when issuing securities to make public the commissions or profits they are receiving.”

The disclosure must be real

This part gets forgotten when people quote the sunlight line. Brandeis didn’t want transparency just for show. He wrote:

“But the disclosure must be real. And it must be a disclosure to the investor.”

Filing a statement in some government office was not enough, he argued. It would be like a food law that had manufacturers file their ingredients with a department “instead of requiring the label to tell the story.”

That is still the trick today. The information technically exists. It sits in a filing nobody reads, an attachment nobody opens, or a meeting held at an hour when working people can’t go. Hiding things in plain sight is still hiding them.

Brandeis also named the condition that lets it happen. The small investor, he wrote, puts up with unfair charges partly because of “his ignorance of the facts.” When people don’t know, nobody has to answer to them.

He even recorded how silence gets bought. A member of a leading banking house told him why the firm gave $10,000 of stock to the president of a local bank: if that man were ever asked about the stock and only shrugged, customers might be lost. The banker’s words, as Brandeis quoted them: “We had to give him $10,000 of the stock to teach him not to shrug his shoulders.”

The scheme was not to make someone lie. It was to make sure he had a reason to look pleased. That is how a lot of corruption works: quiet incentives, no public record of who got what, and nobody asking.

What intelligence work taught me

I served 11 years in the U.S. Air Force in measurement and signature intelligence, MASINT. I won’t discuss the work itself. The lesson I can share is simple: things that want to stay hidden still leave traces. Activity has a signature. If someone is patient and disciplined enough to measure it, record it and compare it over time, the hidden thing starts to show.

The other lesson matters just as much. Collecting the information is not enough. It has to reach the people who can act on it, in a form they can use. Intelligence that sits in a drawer changes nothing. That is the same point Brandeis made about filings nobody reads.

Corruption works the same way. It depends on nobody measuring, nobody recording and nobody connecting the dots. It does not need everyone to be dishonest, only enough people to be busy, tired or sure that asking questions is pointless.

Life is war, so fight with discipline

My philosophy is that life is war. I don’t mean violence. I mean that nothing worth having is handed to you. You prepare, you know the ground, you keep your discipline, and you don’t lie to yourself about the enemy.

Anger without discipline is noise. People can tune it out, and the ones in power are counting on that. Disciplined anger is different. It shows up with dates, documents and specific questions. Brandeis was angry too, but he counted. He listed commissions, percentages and dollar amounts, and that is why people still quote him.

So here are my orders, to myself first and then to anyone reading.

For citizens:

For small-business owners:

Turn on the lights

Brandeis wrote those lines more than a hundred years ago. Every generation since has had to relearn them, because the people who profit in the dark never stop trying to switch the lights off.

I can’t fix the system alone, and neither can you. But each of us can refuse to be the one who shrugs. We can keep records, ask questions in public and insist that disclosure be real.

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants. It only works if someone opens the curtains. Let’s open them.

— Ho Chanh Nghia

Sources

All quotes are from Chapter V, “What Publicity Can Do,” of Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), first published in Harper’s Weekly (December 20, 1913).

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