Despite its repeated promises of transparency, the Obama Administration has been slow to befriend the Freedom of Information Act. As this year's celebration of Sunshine Week unfolds (March 11-17), which according to sunshineweek.com "is a national initiative to promote a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information," it appears that the administration is making progress with its transparency, but there are still areas that definitely need improvement.

The Associated Press' Richard Lardner and Ted Bridis recently reported that "a new AP analysis of the latest federal data" found that "Federal agencies did better last year trying to fulfill requests, but still fell further behind with backlogs, due mostly to surges in immigration records requested from the Homeland Security Department."

Overall, the federal government's information release rates matched "the same rate as the previous two years." AP‘s analysis, which covered three years of numbers "from 37 of the largest federal departments and agencies" found that "there was progress." The government responded to more requests "than ever" in 2011; "legal provisions that allow" the government "to keep records secret, especially emails and documents describing how federal officials make important decisions," were cited less frequently; and, agencies moved faster in their response time.

In this age of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and un-monikered hackers with skill sets that allow them to purloin information from government entities, political groups, and corporations -- both public and private -- the Freedom of Information Act could be seen as an anachronism. Nevertheless, despite such diverse twenty-first century information-gathering talents, the FOIA remains an important tool for journalists, investigative reporters, nonprofits, civic groups, and citizens concerned with the public's right to know.

In September 1966, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal law that establishes the public's right to obtain information from federal government agencies. On the 40th anniversary of the FOIA in 2006, I reported that "documents ... discovered at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, by the National Security Archive at George Washington University ... revealed that President Johnson had serious doubts about how much and what types of information should be made available through the FOIA."

The Associated Press' Ted Bridis reported that Johnson "submitted a signing statement [along with the bill] that some researchers believe was intended to undercut the measure's purpose of forcing government to disclose records except in narrow cases. Draft language from Johnson's statement arguing that 'democracy works best when the people know what their government is doing,' was changed with a handwritten scrawl to read: 'Democracy works best when the people have all the info that the security of the nation will permit.'"

William Fisher, a longtime journalist and expert of right-to-know issues, recently noted that Johnson "refused to hold any kind of [bill signing] ceremony that would attract the media's attention."

During the Bush years, attempts to weaken the FOIA were business as usual: Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive in 2001 encouraging agencies to deny FOIA information requests; older unclassified documents were re-classified as secret.; new documents were classified "secret" at unprecedented rates; and government agencies demanded that organizations making FOIA requests pay exorbitant research fees.

During the Bush years, the Air Force Research Laboratory announced that it was giving a one million dollar grant to Jeffrey Addicott, now the director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, "to produce a national 'model statute' that state legislatures and Congress could adopt to ensure that potentially dangerous information 'stays out of the hands of the bad guys.'"

USA Today reported that the Addicott grant was for "research aimed at rolling back the amount of sensitive data available to the press and public through freedom-of-information requests."

The hubbub created by the USA Today article caused the Air Force Research Laboratory to back out of the project.

The Obama administration takes on the FOIA

In a new piece at OpEdNews.com titled "FOIA: Honored in the Breach!" William Fisher describes more threats to the FOIA. This time, however, it's coming from the Obama Administration. From the very beginning of his term as president, Barack Obama promised transparency, and a commitment "to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government," Fisher reported. Eric Holder, Obama's new attorney general "issued a directive to emphasize the importance of the FOIA law's purpose and ‘to ensure that it is realized in practice.'"

Fischer noted that "Holder ordered that unless there was a compelling state interest in secrecy, our citizenry was entitled to know what their government was up to. It was to be a real change in mind set. The public was not the enemy!"

What seemed like the ushering in of a new era of transparency and a clear-cut victory for the public's right-to-know, has instead turned into an updated version of "same as it ever was."

In March 2010, the Associated Press' Sharon Theimer reported that "One year into its promise of greater government transparency, the Obama administration is more often citing exceptions to the nation's open records law to withhold federal records even as the number of requests for information declines..."

According to Fischer, "... numerous studies and surveys ... carried out by researchers in and out of government" - including recent studies published by TRAC (the Transactional Records Access Clearing House, a research unit at Syracuse University) -- have found that "The FOIA law has been amended many times and it appears that most of the amendments have tilted toward finding more and more reasons NOT to disclose."

Fisher reported the use "deliberative process exemption," had skyrocketed under the Obama administration. According to Fischer, the exemption "which allows the government to withhold documents dealing with its internal decision making process" (an exemption "Obama explicitly told the agencies not to use") has risen from 47,395 times in 2008 to 70,779 times in 2009. Last year, according to the AP, it fell to 43,731.

The AP reported that "At the Justice Department, however - which is responsible for ensuring that agencies comply with Obama's orders to be more transparent - officials invoked the exemption 1,500 times last year, an increase from 1,231 times the previous year."

Open government advocates and the Justice Department clashed over the past year when the department "proposed formalizing the practice, in some situations, of federal law enforcement agencies telling people who request records that the government doesn't have the records when it actually does," the AP reported. However, the department backed off after threats from Senator Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"During the year when American troops were involved in two wars and a bombing campaign in Libya, Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden ... and U.S. drones killed scores of terror suspects and insurgents, the administration more aggressively protected federal files that it said should be shielded due to national security reasons," according to the AP. "The government invoked that explanation 4,244 times last year - a significant increase over the 3,615 times it did so in 2010."

"Journalists have been among the most consistent users of FOIA requests," William Fisher pointed out. "But the obstacles, and the time, money and people-power needed to surmount them, have shown signs of discouraging this constituency."

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About author Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His Conservative Watch columns document the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.