The Bush Administration’s lust for secrecy is well documented. And as davidk at TPM Muckraker wrote recently, Bush and Company is "the most secretive administration in history."

But even so this latest gambit by the Administration is over the line. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports on how earlier this month the Bush White House issued a memorandum outlining new Executive Branch rules on the handling of sensitive but not classified information. They coined the term "Controlled Unclassified Information" (How’s that for bureaucratic doublespeak?) for information so sensitive that its disclosure would create "risk of substantial harm." They replaced the term "Sensitive but Unclassified."

According to Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News, the definition of the information that qualifies as Controlled Unclassified Information is "vague and expansive," and adds that the new policy will do nothing to restore public access to government records that have been improperly withheld. smintheus at Daily Kos writes that the Bush administration used the writing of the new rules as an opportunity to expand the range of government secrecy. He adds that hyper-classification was already "out of control."

Hopefully the new occupants of the West Wing, whoever wins in November, will reverse the eclipse of transparency that is a primary legacy of the current occupants of the White House.

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The Politico reports on a campaign by Friends of the Earth (FOE) in opposition to the America’s Climate Security Act S.2191, commonly referred to on the Hill as the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. (There’s a split within the environmental movement whether this bill is the best way to address climate change legislatively but FOE thinks it does not go far enough and would be a windfall to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.)

Politico says that FOE adopted the by-the-book strategy of taking out ads in Capitol Hill newspapers to try to influence the public. But then they also bought ads on liberal blogs and environmental Web sites hoping that they would generate buzz for their side on this divisive issue. FOE made a two-week buy on Daily Kos, MyDD.com, openleft.com and Tapped, among others. The hope was that the campaign would get the issue to bubble up in the debates on the blogs, knowing that these blog sites’ readers include many engaged political activists. It worked…At least at generating buzz. The issue’s prominence rose on Daily Kos after the ads went up, and the issue became a front page item there. No doubt they recruited hundreds, if not thousands to their cause.

The struggle in Congress over climate change is just beginning, but FOE has shown that organizations that understand the power of the Web can use it to their advantage. That’s a promise of Web 2.0. We are seeing that like-minded activists are building their own networks at MyOpenCongress - connecting with people who are interested in the same legislation. Activists are literally on the tip of the iceberg in this arena of networking around issues and politicians of interest.

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