Betty Medsger

The Obama administration has used the Freedom of Information Act to increase rather than decrease government secrecy. In 2013, it increased use of exemptions to bar release of requested files by 22% over the previous year, according an analysis by the Associated Press. The government fully denied or redacted large portions of files in 36% of the 704,394 requests submitted

There also was a substantial increase in citing national security concerns as reason for withholding information. The administration did so 8,496 times in 2013 – more than double the rate in President Obama's first year in office. The National Security Agency censored records or denied FOIA requests 98%of the time in 2013.

This growing disregard for openness is especially disappointing from a president who, on his first full day in office, announced he would have the most transparent administration in history. It is evident not only in the administration's handling of FOIA requests, but also in the recent CIA dispute with the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee over the committee's report on the government's use of torture in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the scope and nature of mass surveillance by the NSA, known because of files made public by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The need to reverse this trend is evident in the critical role the FOIA has played in revealing secrets that, once public, led to major reforms. The revelation of COINTELPRO, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's secret illegal operations, is an example of the fundamental importance of the FOIA.

The files made public by the burglars who stole files from the Media, Pa., FBI office in 1971 gave Americans their first glimpse of Hoover's clandestine operations. But it was because of the FOIA that more Hoover information public and moved Americans to demand that all intelligence agencies be investigated by Congress.

Hoover had understood the potential power of an access law. He campaigned vigorously for the defeat of the first FOIA. When it became law in 1966, he ordered bureau officials not to comply. After he died in 1972, the FBI continued to keep all of its files secret, even withholding some from the Senate committee, known as the Church Committee, that investigated intelligence agencies in 1975.

A year after the Media files were revealed, NBC reporter Carl Stern noticed one of those files in the Senate Judiciary Committee office -- a routing slip that contained the term COINTELPRO. Wondering what the term meant, Stern asked Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst for records that established and defined COINTELPRO. Kleindienst refused, saying the records must "be kept secret in the interest of the national defense and foreign policy."

Stern sued for the files under the FOIA. When a judge ordered the FBI to issue the files to him in 1973, he became the first journalist to receive FBI files under the 1966 FOIA. Those files, directives from Hoover, revealed that he had established COINTELPRO to "expose, disrupt ... or otherwise neutralize" the New Left. Repeatedly emphasizing that such operations be kept secret, Hoover used the tools of espionage, usually reserved for foreign enemies, against Americans whose ideas he disliked.

Reforms were established after the Church Committee investigation, but the most effective oversight has resulted from strengthening the FOIA in 1974. Since then, most investigations of intelligence agencies have been initiated not as a result of congressional oversight initiatives, but as a result of evidence released in response to FOIA requests.

The FBI fought the 1974 FOIA reform, as did then-White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Chief of White House Staff Dick Cheney, and then-head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Resistance continues: The FBI spent $1 million trying to prevent Seth Rosenfeld, author of The Subversives, a 2012 book about Hoover's decades-long campaign against the University of California, from getting files that document that history. When Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked officials if the bureau had purposely tried to bar Rosenfeld access to files, most of the report by FBI General Counsel Howard Shapiro was redacted. But one important finding remained:

"It appears that we were advancing arguments that bordered on the frivolous in order to cover our own previous misconduct."

In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Obama administration was described as using the FOIA as a "tool of secrecy, not openness" by David Cuillier, president of the Society of Professional Journalists and director of the University of Arizona School of Journalism. The trend toward increased secrecy in the government, he said, is so great that we are "approaching a crisis."

Betty Medsger is the author ofThe Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI. In 1971, as a Washington Post reporter, she was the first person to write about the Media files. This column was produced in partnership withOpenTheGovernment.org.

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