Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News reminds us that Friday July 4th is the 42^nd anniversary of Lyndon Johnson signing the Freedom of Information Act into law.  Interesting, but frankly, FOIA hasn’t aged well.  Meant to be “Democracy’s X-Ray,” allowing journalists and other citizens to ferret out waste, fraud, abuse and corruption the reality is that FOIA plays into the notion that government shouldn’t automatically provide information. I think it should.

This spring, I wrote an essay The Merciful Death of the Freedom of Information Act and the Birth of True Government Transparency: A Short History that was published in Rebooting Democracy, a compendium of some 44 essays, was released last month at the Personal Democracy Forum conference.  In the essay I keyed off a Jeff Jarvis blog post where he called for the abolition of FOIA. “Why should we be asking for information about and from our government?” he wrote. “The government should have to ask to keep things from us…Government information-every act of government on our behalf-should be free by default.” Digital technology and web-based tools now allow business transactions to be digitally captured, stored, and opened to search and analysis, he argued. This was not possible when the information was stored on paper in file cabinets.

But to get there, there has to be a sea change in the attitude of government. I think we are moving in the right direction but it will take time. But citizens are getting used to getting more information via the Internet and it makes them want more.

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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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File this under "Two steps forward, one step back."

Secrecy News highlights a change in disclosure policy by several federal defense intelligence agencies in anticipation of last week’s launching of USAspending.gov. Claiming that online disclosure of their unclassified contracts would compromise security, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) asked the Department of Defense for and received permission to keep the documents secret. "I appreciate your concerns that reporting these actions to the publicly accessible website could provide unacceptable risk of insight to your individual missions and budgets," wrote Shay D. Assad of the Under Secretary of Defense in a December 7 memorandum (pdf). "But when it comes to intelligence spending, there will actually be a net loss of public information because categories of intelligence contracting data that were previously disclosed will now be withheld," writes Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News editor.

The waiver applies to unclassified contract data for FY 2007 and 2008, and must be renewed each following year. However, data from FY2005 - 2006 for two of the agencies, DIA and NGA, is not covered by the waiver and is available. Go figure. Data from CIFA is not available. As Secrecy News says, while there is a sharp increase in intelligence agencies contracting with private entities, "public accountability is going down."

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