National Archives debuts online search

from The Hill:

The National Archives and Records Administration is letting the public preview a new search tool that digs through the government's huge archive of public records.

Users visiting a prototype of the new site can search for everything from a child's letter to the president to the iconic image of WWII's Rosie the Riveter among more than 10.9 million permanent electronic records.

Read the rest here.

CIA faces second probe over videotape destruction

from msnbc.com:

The legal inquiries into the CIA’s destruction of videotapes showing the brutal interrogation of terror suspects may not be over after all.

A day after the Justice Department announced that a special counsel had concluded his investigation into the matter without bringing criminal charges, officials of the National Archives and Records Administration signaled Wednesday that they plan to reopen their own long delayed probe into whether the agency’s actions constituted an improper destruction of federal records.

“We’re not going to let this drop,” Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives told NBC.

Read the rest here.

Sen. Kerry Pushes for Release of King Records

Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has introduced legislation that would require all records relating to the life and death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to be located, reviewed and released by a National Archives review board. The legislation is part of a larger movement to force the release of information about violence against blacks during the civil rights era, including unsolved lynching and bombing cases.

Read more about it here.

Obama Issues New Executive Order for Classified Documents

President Obama's recent executive order and accompanying presidential memorandum declares that "no information may remain classified indefinitely." The executive order is part of an overhaul of the executive branch's system for protecting classified national security information.

The executive order requires agency heads to conduct a periodic review of the agency's classification guidelines to ensure that classified information that no longer requires protection can be declassified.

Obama also eliminated a 2003 rule by the Bush administration that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Under the Obama rule, spy agencies who object to a decision will have to appeal to the president.

Obama also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to streamline the process of declassifying historical documents and set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million page backlog of such records, including archives relating to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

For more information, see the New York Times article here.

Millions of Bush Administration E-mails Found

The AP reports that computer technicians found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the George W. Bush administration as part of litigation brought against the Executive Office of the President in 2007 by two private groups - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive. The two groups alleged the Bush White House failed to install an electronic record-keeping system.

Before the emails are released to the public, the National Archives will have to process the records for release. The records won't be available until 2014 at the earliest.

For more details regarding the e-mail discovery, click here.

Nisbet appointed director of OGIS

Miriam Nisbet was appointed as the director of the Office of Government Information Services within the National Archives and Records Administration. Nisbet has been working in Paris as the director of the Information Society Division of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. Other positions she has held include: legislative counsel at the American Library Association, special counsel for information policy at the National Archives and deputy director of the Office Information and Privacy at the Department of Justice.

Acting Archivist of the United States Adrienne Thomas announced today the appointment of Miriam Nisbet as the director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) within the National Archives and Records Administration. OGIS, an organization newly established under the OPEN Government Act of 2007, will provide policy guidance and mediation services for FOIA activities government-wide.

In making the announcement, Archivist Thomas said, “Ms. Nisbet is a devoted public servant who is uniquely qualified for this position. She has dedicated her entire professional life to working for open access to government records from the perspective of both the federal government and non-governmental institutions, as well as the international community. We are also delighted to welcome her back to the Archives, where she was Special Counsel for Information Policy in the 1990’s.”

“I am tremendously excited about the opportunity to be part of a new office and a new approach to make the Freedom of Information Act work better, for the requesters who seek access to records and for the Federal officials who administer the law,” said Ms. Nisbet.

More here.

Bill aims to correct overclassification of records

Almost a third of the 362,000 FOIA requests made last year have yet to be processed due to overclassification, according to a New York Times editorial. A recently introduced bill would require the "national archivist to prescribe how and what to classify, with particular emphasis on cutting back categories and ending the pro forma withholding of nonsensitive information requested by the public."

By last count, the federal government employs 107 different categories of restricted information — one off-limits category zanily pronounces, “sensitive but unclassified.” This muddle of mislabeling seems designed not to protect legitimate secrets but to empower bureaucrats. The end result has been to greatly blunt the Freedom of Information Act’s mandate to let the public in on the business of government, plain and simple.

The House has just approved a measure to end this plague of pseudoclassification. Its backers say it is not just a boon for the public, but an attempt to promote “a common language within government.” There are so many taboos that agencies are even having trouble understanding one another’s rubber-stamp restrictions.

“Official use only” has been slapped wholesale on documents, even though there’s no common standard for what that means. The House measure would correct that by having the national archivist prescribe how and what to classify, with particular emphasis on cutting back categories and ending the pro forma withholding of nonsensitive information requested by the public.

More here.

Obama approves $1 million for FOIA ombudsman

The Bush administration provided no funding for the new Office of Government Information Services and attempted to relocate it under the Justice Department, which defends the government FOIA decisions, Columbia Journalism Review reported. The good news, however, is that Obama's budget provides $1 million to the new office, which is likely to be up and running by the end of the year in the National Archives, instead.

The budget President Obama just signed includes one million dollars for the new Office of Government Information Services, which will be housed in the National Archives that is charged with serving as a government wide ombudsman for the Freedom of Information Act process.

Gary Stern, the Archives’ general counsel, speaking in January before a Washington College of Law-sponsored conference on freedom of information, made it clear that the agency was expecting an initial appropriation of that amount, and said that most of the funds would go towards the office’s director and a half dozen support staff.

The Bush administration had, despite the explicit intent of congress, signed a quiet budget provision in an attempt to put the office within the branch of the Justice Department charged with defending the government’s FOIA decisions, and provided it with no funding. Outside advocates and members of Congress members who’d worked on creating OGIS not surprisingly viewed this as a rather naked conflict of interest and an attempt to neuter the office.

More here.

Federal Judge to Bush Admin: Let's Search for E-Mail

With Bush administration White House aides on their way out the door in coming days, a federal judge this morning ordered the president's executive office to undertake a comprehensive search for millions of senior appointees' e-mails that have been inaccessible and possibly missing since 2005.

The order reflects a continuing effort by outside groups to ensure that the White House transfers historically significant materials to the National Archives on or before next Tuesday, as required by federal law. District Court Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. demanded that officials search computer workstations, preserve thumb drives and examine e-mail archives created or retained by White House employees from 2003 to 2005, the period in which a records gap exists.

More here.

An update: the administration now says it has found the missing e-mails, albeit at a cost of $10 million.

An Interesting Persepctive From An Historian...

In today's Post:

Giving Americans back their history may not rank with ending the war in Iraq or balancing the budget, but it should be high on the to-do list of the next president. Our declassification system has broken down. Historians are waiting an average of seven years for replies from presidential libraries to their Freedom of Information Act requests. The White House cannot locate millions of e-mail records created during the months immediately before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The problem goes far beyond the Bush administration or its immediate predecessors. Tens of thousands of pages of previously declassified top-secret documents that I read and photographed two years ago at the Naval Historical Center at the Washington Navy Yard, while researching a minute-by-minute narrative of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, were closed to researchers in March pending an indefinite security "review." The ostensible reason for pulling the records is the 1999 Kyl-Lott amendment that requires the rescreening of millions of documents for supposedly sensitive nuclear secrets. But it is difficult to explain why the Navy waited nearly a decade before acting.

More here.

Hillary Sits On Records...

The National Archives is withholding from the public about 2,600 pages of records at President Clinton's direction, despite a public assurance by one of his top aides last month that Mr. Clinton "has not blocked the release of a single document."

The 2,600 pages, stored at Mr. Clinton's library in Arkansas, were deemed to contain "confidential advice" and, therefore, "closed" under the Presidential Records Act, an Archives spokeswoman, Susan Cooper, told The New York Sun yesterday.

An official who oversees the presidential libraries operated by the federal government, Sharon Fawcett, said in a recent interview that the records were withheld in accordance with a letter Mr. Clinton wrote in 1994 exercising his right to hold back certain types of files and another letter in 2002 about narrowing the scope of his earlier instructions. Asked by National Journal whether Mr. Clinton had "total control" over the closure of records under the confidential-advice provisions of the law, Ms. Fawcett said he did.

More here.