Corrected at 4:08 p.m. on April 6.

The Freedom of Information Act needs an upgrade befitting the ease and access of the Internet era, according to Rep. Steve Israel, who has introduced a bill promising just that.

The New York Democrat intends to improve access to public documents through POIA, the Public Online Information Act, which will require the executive branch to begin putting its public information online.

"'Public' is to be redefined to mean online and searchable," Israel said in a news conference outside the Capitol on Tuesday.

FOIA has become "outdated," said Ellen Miller, executive director of the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, who helped Israel's office craft the legislation. Created in 1966 under President Lyndon Johnson as a way to make government documents accessible, FOIA now carries hindrances of its own, Miller said, restricting curious citizens to a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. window and mandating formal requests for documents -- followed by drawn-out waiting periods. Israel likened the experience of searching for files in federal basements to searching the cavernous government warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a process that he says is "out of the dark ages."

POIA requires the federal chief information officer to put all executive documents online, in a user-friendly format, permanently, and without charges or fees. Every federal agency will be required to establish a searchable catalogue of all public documents, because transparency isn't just having documents available, it's "knowing what documents" are available, according to Israel.

That includes public records that are harder to file for and not available online, including pension plan annual filings, lobbyist disclosure activities by government contractors, personal financial disclosure forms from high level government officials, and reports on executive branch official travel when it's paid by third parties, said Brad Bauman, the Sunlight Foundation's communications manager.

Executive agencies would have three years from the time the bill passes to come up with a plan for implementing the new requirements. POIA is not retroactive and will only be applied to prospective documents. POIA would eventually be expanded to non-executive documents.

"We're giving the executive branch a reasonable amount of time to achieve these goals," Israel said when asked if staffing and time constraints could hamper POIA's initial progress. "It's easier and more cost-effective to digitally scan a document than to have it shipped to a basement."

The sometimes slow, sometimes timely turnaround of documents under the current law brings mixed feedback from filers. A recent National Security Archive report discovered that "ancient requests -- as old as 18 years -- still persist in the FOIA system."

"When I was first doing stuff in 1994 to get lobbying records and campaign finance information -- the only way to get them was to hop on a train and come down to Washington, D.C.," said Sunlight Foundation political analyst Bill Allison, a veteran journalist. "There is a lot more transparency now, but that being said, there's still a tremendous amount of information journalists can't get to in part because you don't know it's there and in part because even though it's public, the government has set things up in a way that doesn't allow you to easily access them."

Allison supports POIA not only because citizens would be able to research documents from anywhere in the world at any moment, but "because it is one of the few open-government initiatives that has an enforcement mechanism," allowing individuals to sue agencies if records aren't handed over.

"Without the compliance stick there, it's not going to work," said Allison, who points to the E-Government Act of 2002 an example. "That's the mechanism E-Gov doesn't have because there's no recourse if a federal agency doesn't honor its terms. POIA provides more than just writing an angry letter and not being able to do anything else about it."

By mimicking FOIA, he said "POIA gives citizens a very strong ability to sue to make the government justify what it's doing," and why it refuses to put public documents online.

Another benefit of POIA is its facility to solve a persistent 21st-century conundrum -- what makes a "journalist"? The advent of blogging created the "citizen journalist," who reports news independently. Until 2007, only established-press reporters and nonprofits were exempt from FOIA filing fees, which can cost anywhere from 20 cents per page up to $522,886 in one case, according to a report by Wired released late last year. Established press also have priority to receive timely turnarounds and agencies and businesses have less of an incentive to withhold information from them.

In 2007, the OPEN Government Act passed, creating standards to expand the definition of journalist, requiring only prior publication history or description of how the independent reporter provides information to a large audience.

But with POIA, bloggers could bypass the entire filing process because documents are available online for free, and anyone -- journalist, blogger and citizen -- would have equal access.

When asked if he expects his bill to meet opposition in the House, Israel responded, "The only opposition of this is going to come from supporters of the status quo. There are going to be some in the executive branch who say, 'Well, we need to study this, it's going to be a burden on us to put all of this on the Internet.' But we think we gave accommodations to them by giving them three years in order to effectuate this transformation.

"There's no good reason to oppose this bill other than they want to keep documents inaccessible, keep documents hidden and secret. That is not an agenda we can support."

Nor does it seem to be the agenda of President Obama, who made one of his first acts in office a memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, which pressed agencies to better comply with FOIA standards. A consortium of independent outside government reform groups gave the Obama administration an "A" for openness work in his first year after he mandated nine transparent tools including the Open Government Directive, instructing "every agency to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public." Obama also issued a memorandum to reform the FOIA system.

CORRECTION: POIA is not an upgrade of or change to FOIA, which the original version of this report implied. POIA proactively requires the government to publish all public documents online, while FOIA provides citizens with the right to request both public and private documents, which are disseminated on a case-by-case basis.