Classified records

OpenTheGovernment.org, a group of organizations dedicated to enhancing and preserving freedom of information in government, states in its newly released annual report that while the Obama administration has strengthened its openness more than the Bush administration — which was criticized for its secrecy and unaccountability — a true trend toward transparency remains to be seen. The group studied the last three months of the Bush administration and the first nine months of Obama’s administration.

President Obama on Monday issued an anticipated declassification order and memorandum to agency heads that dictates no records can be kept classified indefinitely during his administration.

Government officials are working at breakneck speed to halt the pending declassification of millions of historical records scheduled for release next month, according to a report by Secrecy News.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. this week decided to exclude the public from oral arguments concerning the legality of military detentions, The Blog of Legal Times reports.  

The Obama administration is striving for a more transparent government but faces a number of practical problems in getting there, according to a host of panelists who spoke Thursday at a conference on information policy in the new administration.

As part of a nearly three-year-old Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Justice was ordered by a federal court Friday to turn over copies of 10 memos that provided the legal underpinnings for President Bush's domestic surveillance program.

The memos, written by the Office of Legal Counsel, will be reviewed privately by the court. 

An Army historian today told a government declassification group that the Army is not enforcing its record-keeping policies and that it is not receiving adequate records from military units in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Records are just not kept," Dr. Richard Davis of the U.S. Army Center of Military History told the Public Interest Declassification Board at its third open meeting of the year. "As of October 2005, not one Army unit returned one record."

The Navy is now instructing its personnel who classify records to consider ways they might group ordinarily unclassified records together to qualify as a compilation that could be considered classified -- a practice called classification by compilation.

The creative thinking at the Navy abounds -- shame it's being harnessed in ways to keep truly unclassified (and thus, innocuous) information from the citizens of the country it serves, rather than, say, working to actually serve the public.

A former federal air marshal has been dealt a major blow in his quest to regain his job after being fired for funneling internal information to the media in 2003, the Associated Press reported.

A sheriff's deputy in North Carolina posed as a Newsweek reporter to coax an anonymous source out of a local newspaper journalist. And it worked.

In a case of scandal climbing atop scandal, the deputy got The (Jacksonville) Daily News reporter Lindell Kay to hand over the phone number of a source in a high-profile homicide case, leading to criminal charges against an intern in the local district attorney's office.