Bad Obama -- Health Care Negotiations Taking Place Behind Closed Doors

Despite campaign promises to reform health care in the sunlight of public scrutiny, Obama's allowing health care legislation negotiations to take place behind closed doors.  Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) as well as top White House aides are trying to merge competing versions of the legislation into one bill.

Republicans and open government advocates are upset by the secretive process.

More here.

Open Records Advocates Seek to Remove Exemptions to FOIA

Tom Curley, president and chief executive of The Associated Press, testified on behalf of the Sunshine in Government Initiative at a hearing regarding the Office of Government Information Services.  He noted there is still a "secrecy reflex" in place at many federal agencies, despite the Obama's new standards for government openness.   

Curley cited more than 240 statutes that agencies may use for denying FOIA requests.

Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) have introduced legislation in the Senate that would require any such exemptions to be clearly stated, rather than be buried in the legislation.  The legislation has passed the Senate twice but has not yet been considered by the House.

Get more information here.  Read Curley's testimony here.

Wash. panel considers abandoning 'legislative privilege'

Washington's Sunshine Committee is considering a recommendation to abandon legislative exemption, The Spokesman-Review reported. Current state law "allows Senate and House clerks to keep secret anything that's not an 'official action' of the House or Senate." This means lawmakers can refuse to release e-mails or letters though they sometimes do voluntarily release them. Critics say doing away with the exemption will only lead lawmakers to start using personal computers and e-mail addresses to subvert the law.

It’s been nearly 40 years since Washington voters, seeking to make government more transparent, overwhelmingly passed a law requiring cities, counties and state agencies – with some exceptions – to open their meetings and files to the public.

Want to see how much everybody’s paid? You can. Want to see a mayor’s e-mails? They’re available. The travel receipts turned in by a city councilman on a trip? Help yourself.

Government officials who wrongly deny requests face fines of up to $100 a day. The small city of Mesa, north of the Tri Cities, was fined $246,000 for wrongly refusing records to a former mayor in a dispute that began in 2002. City leaders are considering bankruptcy, the Associated Press reported.

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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.

FOIA exemptions hard to spot

The original Freedom of Information Act included eight exemption categories. The Sunshine in Government Initiative has identified an additional 270, but there could be more. New legislation has been introduced in Congress that would "require any new b(3) exemptions to specifically reference the Freedom of Information Act, so that these exemptions would be easier to spot," the Columbia Journalism Review reported.

The idea behind the Freedom of Information Act is simple: file a request for a document with the government, and they’ll turn it over.

There are, of course, exceptions. The original Act, signed into law on July 4, 1966, listed eight broad exempted categories, including trade secrets, personal medical records, and classified information.

A ninth item ensured it wouldn’t stop there. Section b(3) of the Act says that information can be exempted from disclosure by other statutes. There’s nothing to require that these other exempting statues mention their intent to foil FOIA, and Congress is welcome to write as many of them as they like.

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Congressional data mining could be on its way

A provision that would Congress and its bodies to release data in raw form was slipped into a spending bill passed by the House of Representatives, Mother Jones reported. If the Senate doesn't edit out the three-sentence statement, the public will no longer have to rely on government Web sites, which filter the data they provide. Some Web sites already use remix raw data to create databases and charts, but they must "scrape" government sites to obtain this data -- a process that is cumbersome and not perfect.

By slipping a simple, three-sentence provision into the gargantuan spending bill passed by the House of Representatives last week, a congressman from Silicon Valley is trying to nudge Congress into the 21st Century. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) placed a measure in the bill directing Congress and its affiliated organs—including the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office—to make its data available to the public in raw form. This will enable members of the public and watchdog groups to craft websites and databases showcasing government data that are more user-friendly than the government's own.

If the Senate passes the bill with the provision intact, citizens seeking information about Congress' activities—such as bill names and numbers, amendments, votes, and committee reports—won't have to rely on government websites, which often filter information, are incomplete, or are difficult to use. Instead, the underlying data will be available to anyone who wants to build a superior site or tool to sift through it. "The language is groundbreaking in that it supports providing unfiltered legislative information to the public," says Honda's online communications director, Rob Pierson. "Instead of silo-ing the information, and only allowing access through a limited web form, access to the raw data will make it easier for people to learn what their government is doing."

More here.

Proposed act would be 'blow to the public's right to access vital scientific data'

The Association for Health Care Journalists warns that new House legislation could limit public access to federal research.

Legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on Feb. 3 “would constitute a blow to the public’s right to access vital scientific data” if it goes forward, according to a statement by the Association of Health Care Journalists.

The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, HR 801, introduced by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. and others, would reverse a National Institutes of Health policy that requires federal research grantees to provide their peer-reviewed articles to PubMed Central, a free online database. Under the existing policy, manuscripts resulting from federally-funded research must be made publicly available within 12 months of their publication date.

More here.