New Government Openness Law Not All That Open
By Kim Zetter January 03, 2008 | 1:40:35 PM The Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007 is an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act (aka FOIA) that the media and public use to obtain government documents in order to conduct oversight of government activities. According to the AP story, the new law creates more openness because it reverses orders made by former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that advised government agencies to withhold information if they were uncertain how such information might affect national security. This was contrary to the standard under which FOIA was presumed to work in the past -- which was that information should be released unless there was known harm that could come from releasing it. The AP piece states that the new law "amounts to a congressional pushback against the Bush administration's movement to greater secrecy since the terrorist attacks of 2001." The author of the piece, Ben Feller, notes in his article that "dozens of media outlets, including The Associated Press, supported the legislation." But as Aftergood states in his Secrecy News blog, although the new law contains provisions that allow the media and public to better track the status of their FOIA requests and makes other positive changes toward faster response times to information requests, the law does not reverse Ashcroft's policy directive toward increased secrecy. In fact, Aftergood says, a provision that would have done that was in the original version of the bill when it was in the House, but it was removed before the bill was passed, thus ensuring that the new Open Government law continues to provide for less-than-open government. Inserted from <http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/new-government.html>
New Government Openness Law Not All That Open
Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists points out that an Associated Press story that appeared in top newspapers recently -- including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal -- was wrong in its assessment of a new law that President Bush signed on December 31 that purports to promote more open government.
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