2009 Secrecy Report Card

Hot off the presses -- OpenTheGovernment.org released its 2009 Secrecy Report Card today. It details slight decreases in secrecy across a variety of indicators during the last year of the Bush-Cheney administration. It also provides a six-month overview of the Obama administration's track record on openness issues as well as a section on financial transparency during the economy crisis.

Highlights include:

• Almost $200 Spent Creating and Securing Old Secrets for Every Tax Dollar Spent Declassifying
The government spent nearly $200 maintaining the secrets already on the books for every one
dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2008, a 2% increase in one year. At
the same time, 16% fewer pages were declassified than in 2008.

• Reported Invocations of the "States Secrets" Privilege Continue to Rise
Invoked only 6 times between 1953 and 1976, the privilege has been used a reported 48
times—an average of 6 times per year in 8 years (through 2008)—more than double the aver-
age (2.46) in the previous 24 years.

• President Bush Surpassed All Presidents Since Kennedy in Assertions of Executive Privilege
President G.W. Bush asserted Executive Privilege 6 times in response to congressional re-
quests, as of August 21, 2008.

• 2,083 Orders of the Secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
The Department of Justice reported that, in 2008, the FISC approved 2,083 orders—rejecting
one and approving two left over from the previous year.

Get the complete report here.

It's a bird. It's a plane. It should be public.

The National Transportation Safety Board took a stance against the Federal Aviation Administration's plans to close data on bird and airplane collisions, the AP reported. In a letter to the FAA, the board wrote, "This lack of information could hamper efforts to understand the nature and potential effects of wildlife threats to aviation and hinder the development of mitigations for those threats."

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says he intends to overrule the Federal Aviation Administration on its plan to keep secret data on where and when collisions between birds and airplanes occur.

LaHood told The Washington Post in an interview published Wednesday on its Web site that the public deserves to have access to the information and that the Transportation Department will be making an announcement soon.

Earlier Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board released a letter strongly disagreeing with the FAA's plan.

More here.

Doe v. Doe

The Atlantic tells the ultimate anecdote concerning government secrecy:

Sometimes, plaintiffs's names are protected from disclosure. Sometimes, evidence is placed under seal. Sometimes, entire cases are sealed. Sometimes, the agencies being sued by unnamed deferents are themselves classified. Such is the case with Jane Doe. v. Doe Agency. (Given the involvement of lawyer Mark Zaid, the case appears to have something to do with the Able Danger collection program, a Department of Defense special access program.)

More here.

Former information policy director provides insight on past, advice for future

ProPublica reporter Jennifer LaFleur interviewed Dan Metcalfe, who founded the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy and ran it for more than 25 years. Metcalfe says he has never witnessed a president pay so much attention to FOIA than Obama. Metcalfe advocates a "readily foreseeable harm" standard, which would require FOIA officers to release information that technically falls within an FOIA exemption unless it immediately occurs to them that disclosure could result in harm. He also suggests asking agencies to review "what they have been withholding from the public on that basic since 9/11 and to reconsider that in light of current conditions."

Dan Metcalfe directed the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy for more than 25 years. He founded the office in 1981, under the Reagan administration, and retired in 2007. During that time he drafted two seminal memos on FOIA. One during the Clinton years instructed government agencies to be more open and another in 2001 -- known as the "Ashcroft memorandum" -- that reversed that decision.

He now teaches law at American University and directs the Collaboration on Government Secrecy, the only academic center of its type at a law school.

More here.

Survey shows adults support Obama's FOI plan, still view fed. government as secretive

The 2009 Sunshine Week survey, conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University, shows that public opinion about government secrecy is leveling off but has grown steadily since 2006. Not surprisingly, most people still consider their local and state governments more open than the federal government. People are, however, supportive of President Obama's call for more government transparency.

For the first time in four years, public opinion about government secrecy has leveled off, although more than seven in 10 adults still consider the federal government to be secretive, according to the 2009 Sunshine Week survey by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University.

Since 2006, the percentage of adults who believe the federal government to be somewhat or very secretive has grown steadily; from 62 percent in 2006 to 74 percent in 2008. The latest survey finds 73 percent characterizing federal government as secretive.

This mood is perhaps buoyed by the nearly eight in 10 adults who think President Obama's Freedom of Information directive calling for a presumption of disclosure is the right thing to do.

More here.

Vote for your 10 most wanted

The FOIA blog reported that a new Web site is collecting citizens' votes on what government records should be open to the public. The deadline to request a document and vote is March 9.

OpenTheGovernment.org and the Center for Democracy and Technology has launched a website entitled Show Us the Data: The Most Wanted Federal Government Documents, with the help of Sunlight Labs.

This website gives users the opportunity to vote on what what government information should be freely available on line in a usable format, but is not.

More here.

Obama contradiction leads to bill

The Obama administration ruffled quite a few feathers by taking the same position as former President Bush on an issue involving government secrecy and torture, two positions Obama condemned upon entering office. Now legislation has been filed to limit the use of the "state secrets" privilege, the Boston Globe reported. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the bill "does not restrict the government's ability to assert the privilege in appropriate cases. In light of the pending cases where this privilege has been invoked, involving issues including torture, rendition and warrantless wiretapping, we can ill afford to delay consideration of this important legislation."

House and Senate committees yesterday introduced bills that would sharply curtail the government's use of the "state secrets" privilege, a policy used by President Bush to argue that a lawsuit involving allegations of torture should be dismissed - and a position that the Obama administration has now adopted.

Drafted and filed separately by the House and Senate Judiciary committees, the legislation was filed just days after Justice Department lawyers working for the new administration told a federal appeals court that its position did not differ from the Bush administration's: the court should throw out a lawsuit that accuses Jeppesen Inc., of helping the CIA secretly transport five terrorism suspects overseas for harsh interrogations, on the grounds that the suit involved state secrets that, if revealed, could jeopardize national security.

More here.

Time to cure Ill. 'culture of corruption'

The pressure's on new Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn to act quickly in supporting and enforcing the state's FOIA, the Associated Press reported.

Gov. Patrick Quinn's reform commission has urged him to take immediate action to make Illinois government more open and transparent.

"Transparency in government is fundamental to curing the culture of corruption in Illinois government," chairman Patrick Collins said Wednesday in a letter to Quinn.

The commission's report isn't due until April, but Collins says it's important for Quinn to act now because its "preliminary findings give us serious concerns."

More here.

Future of Illinois public access office becomes questionable?

When Lisa Madigan became Illinois' attorney general, she pledged to hire a public access counselor to help average citizens gain access to public records that they otherwise would not have had the time or money to fight the government for.

Terry Mutchler, the counselor hired, operated with the principle: "No one is above the state's public access laws." But now she's leading Pennsylvania's new open records office. A hiring freeze has been imposed. And, most disturbing of all, the governor has cut the attorney general's budget by 25 percent, more than any other state agency.

The public access office is left with a counselor and fewer resources to continue handling more than 1300 open meetings and FOIA cases a year, most requested by citizens.

During Lisa Madigan's campaign to become Illinois' attorney general, people took note when she pledged to throw back the shades and shed light on the inner-workings of state, local, and county government. Her plan was simple: to hire a public access counselor who would help average citizens and those elected officials with an independent streak understand state laws and, when needed, ride public bodies until they disclosed credit card statements, closed session minutes, cell phone records, and the like.

Dropping the hammer on Illinois public officials who have earned a reputation for doing their bidding behind closed doors -- from single-school districts all the way up to the governor's office -- may have come at a cost, Madigan's deputy chief of staff Cara Smith said. The governor decided to trim AG's budget by more than any other state agency this year. "Do I think this is a coincidence that our budget was cut by 25 percent? Absolutely not," Smith added.

And the public access office has become a casualty of the cuts.

Last spring, Public Access Counselor Terry Mutchler called it quits, after landing a job to head up Pennsylvania's new open records office. With the attorney general's budget gutted, a hiring freeze has been imposed, which has left her position vacant for nearly four months.

More here.

Senate passes 2007 E-Government Reauthorization Act

From the Center for Democracy and Technology:

For five years, the E-Government Act has promoted improvements in the federal government's use of information technology, including increased transparency for government information. The Senate is expected to pass the E-Government Reauthorization Act of 2007 by unanimous consent later tonight. CDT believes that the reauthorization includes two key improvements to the E-Government Act in a call for the development of best practices for Privacy Impact Assessments, and to make online government information more accessible to search.

More here.

News media giving up the fight for information?

Journalists at a National Press Club forum in Denver think so. One panelist raised quite an disconcerting thought: Perhaps the government realizes the media companies are struggling financially and can't afford to take legal action every time they put up a road block to requested information.

Squeezed for profits, news media companies no longer are pushing for access to information as they once did, a panel of Denver journalists said at a National Press Club forum here Tuesday.

"The media seems less and less willing to fight back and to challenge government authority in a legal sense," said Brian Maass, who leads the investigative team at Denver's CBS 4.

He was speaking at a National Press Club Centennial Forum on the First Amendment, freedom of the press and the future of journalism at the Denver Press Club.

More here.

Coverage of 2008 Secrecy Report Card continues

The 2008 Government Secrecy Report Card released Tuesday by OpenTheGovernment.org was covered by media outlets across the country.

Read more:

• 'That's classified': Shining a light on Washington's growing reliance on secrecy; U.S. News & World Report
• Curtailing open government; Las Vegas Sun
  
• US government secrecy continues to rise: annual report; JURIST
• Lipstick on the Constitution?; OpEdNews.com
• Federal secrecy on the rise, even about honeybees; Politics on the Hudson from The Journal News/LoHud.com
• Open government must be preserved; MassLive.com from The Republican (Mass.)
  

Report reveals government secrecy is costing $9.5 billion

A national security expert writes in a new policy brief what all journalists have been arguing: government secrecy does not increase national security and Bush's policies of over-classifying documents as confidential should be stopped.

In the seven years since the September 11 terrorist attacks, there has been a dramatic escalation in federal government secrecy. This increase in information classification comes with a staggering price tag -- a record high of $9.5 billion in 2006 -- and is taking place in the face of almost universal agreement that classifying information is not enhancing national security.

In "Reinventing Transparent Government," a new policy brief for The Century Foundation, Patrick Radden Keefe, fellow and expert on national security and civil liberties issues, calls for rolling back the secrecy of the Bush years and restoring transparency and accountability to American government.

More here.

Read the full brief here.

Report indicates government secrecy is on the rise

OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of individuals and organizations, including NFOIC, released the 2008 Government Secrecy Report Card today.

While the number of FOIA requests received increased, an increase was also noticed in the number records classified as confidential.

Read the full report here.

An AP story reported:

Government secrecy is on the rise by almost every measure, according to a report by a coalition of government oversight groups.

They said the U.S. is classifying more records as top secret or otherwise confidential and employing fewer workers who make federal documents available publicly.

"The open society on which we pride ourselves has been undermined and will take hard work to repair," said the report, described as a "secrecy report card" by OpenTheGovernment.org. It cited 14 different measurements to quantify government secrecy, including patents hidden from the public, secret court approvals for surveillance in sensitive terrorism and espionage investigations and the expanding use of informal labels to keep documents from being disclosed.

More here.

Additional coverage of the 2008 Government Secrecy Report Card:

• Report: Competition down, secrecy up; Federal Computer Week
• New report tracks increase in government secrecy; Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
• Government's secrecy grade: Unsatisfactory; OMB Watch
• Government secrecy on the rise: Think Progress