Visitor logs

Federal appellate court judges Tuesday voiced their concerns that releasing White House visitor logs to an advocacy group could release sensitive information held by the president.

“What if the president met with possible appointees to a position?” Circuit Judge Merrick Garland asked. “They would be revealed. Or what about a unique visitor that would be so sensitive that their name alone would reveal why they were there?”

Despite President Barack Obama’s promise for more transparency in government, the administration has a long way to go, according to experts at a open government conference held in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

An estimated 100 journalists, watchdog group employees, media lawyers and government representatives attended the day-long "Transparency in the Obama Administration" conference hosted by the American University Washington College of Law.

A federal district court in Washington, D.C. held on Wednesday that White House visitor logs are agency records and therefore subject to possible disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act in Judicial Watch, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.

Mere weeks after the White House began publishing select visitor logs online, the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch has sued the U.S. Secret Service for access to still-unreleased visitor logs under the Freedom of Information Act.

The White House on Friday published nearly 500 visitor records online that detail visits made in the months from Obama's inauguration until the end of July, The Washington Post reported.

The records were in response to 110 specific records requests made in September and were released nearly two months before the White House is set to begin publishing visitor logs online each month.

Despite the Obama administration's recent legal settlement to begin releasing White House visitor logs later this year, it has denied a different public interest group's recent request for those same records in the meantime.

The Obama White House will begin posting online logs of its visitors for the first time in an agreement reached over a series of lawsuits for the records last week.

In another reminder that the openness promised during campaign season has not become reality, the Obama administration is refusing to disclose White House dates with key players in the health care industry, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.

The more things change, the more they stay the same: The Obama administration is refusing to tell who visits the White House -- just like the Bush team did.

The Bush Administration is packing its boxes of records as it prepares to leave the White House next week -- and is required by law to send most of those documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. But ensuring that the transition follows the law is troubling to a host of groups with pending records suits against the administration, who want to ensure the documents are retained and that their suits can still go forward.