Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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American Association of Law Libraries
For over a century, the American Association of Law Libraries has been a strong voice on a broad array of information policy issues, including matters related to copyright, access to government information and privacy. The now 5,000-member AALL is hosting its annual meeting in Washington this week.
And I’m honored to announce that Sunlight is this year’s recipient of the Public Access to Government Information Award, given in the spirit of AALL’s principal tenet: the right of equal access to information for all to ensure an informed citizenry and to promote a just and democratic society. For the past decade, the organization has been bestowing the award to recognize persons or organizations that have made significant contributions to protect and promote greater public access to government information. The fact that friend and colleague Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch was last year’s recepient only makes it that much sweeter. Also, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and author of “Secrecy News” was the recipient in 2006, putting Sunlight in very good company. A full listing of their awards can be viewed here.
I would like to send special and heartfelt thanks to the folks at AALL for their work and for recognizing ours.
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Welcome News
Here’s some welcome news. Yesterday, President Obama issued a memo calling on his administration to conduct what The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder termed “a bow-to-stern review” of the government’s secrecy policy. The president tasked his attorney general and Homeland Security secretary to head a task force that will work to improve federal agencies’ sharing of unclassified national security information when appropriate. And he directed them to restore the Clinton administration’s “presumption against classification” that the Bush administration had ended. Last week, in a speech at the National Archives, Obama promised he would be launching a review of current policies by all of those agencies responsible for the classification of documents to determine where reforms are possible.
As DemocraticLuntz, after reading Obama’s memo, wrote on Daily Kos, “the goal is to declassify early, declassify often, and declassify in an efficient, orderly, manner, while still keeping classified those things which are truly necessary to be classified for national security purposes.” The Washington Post quoted Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and Sunlight friend, praising the move as a way to set the wheels in motion. “This is music to the ears of many of us,” Aftergood said, “but the hard work remains to be done — how to translate these goals into policies.”
Maybe, just maybe, they are serious about “operating with an unprecedented level of openness.” We continue to see signs of it.
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Happy Birthday FOIA
Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News reminds us that Friday July 4th is the 42nd 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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Hyper-Hyper-Classification
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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GAO’s Oversight of NSA. Not.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, writing at Secrecy News, reports that the Congress has not used the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to perform any oversight of the National Security Agency (NSA), despite maintaining an office there to do just that.
Despite multi-billion dollar acquisition failures at NSA and the Agency’s controversial, possibly illegal surveillance practices . . .Congress has declined to summon all of its oversight resources such as GAO to address such issues.
When asked NSA oversight during a Senate hearing, David Walker, GAO’s comptroller general, verified that the agency has office space at the NSA, but they don’t use it since they are not receiving any request for oversight from Congress. He added that he didn’t want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs.
Sen. Daniel Akaka, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on government oversight, has introduced the Intellegence Community Audit Act of 2007 (S. 82), that would bolster GAO’s oversight role in auditing the country’s intelligence agencies. Last Friday, Akaka convened a hearing on the subject, GovernmentExecutive.com reports, and Steven testified that federal spending on intelligence has almost doubled in the last decade, going from $26.6 billion in 1997 to more than $50 billion last year, without any corresponding increase in oversight. Steven also said intelligence agencies have doubled their spending to hire private contractors over roughly the same time period, again with inadequate oversight, what Steven termed, "In effect…a net decrease in intelligence oversight."
GAO has been called the "Congressional Watchdog" and the "Taxpayers’ Best Friend." Huh?
