Public access to government information has progressively come under attack as part of the war on terrorism. New measures are still being offered, and the fall-out from previously announced measures is, in some cases, just now being felt.
Some of the highlights (or, rather, lowlights) include:
” In October, the Justice Department cited the Sept. 11
attacks in a memo to federal FOIA officers that stated, “When
you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold
records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the
Department of Justice will defend your decisions.” The policy
reverses the directive issued by former Attorney General Janet
Reno, who urged agencies not to unduly limit records found
responsive to a FOIA request.
” The sweeping Homeland Security Act, establishing a new
governmental agency for homeland security, includes a provision
allowing the agency to withhold “sensitive but
unclassified” information. The act does not, however, define
the word “sensitive,” leaving the term open to perhaps
absurd interpretation.
” The same legislation creates a FOIA exemption for
“critical infrastructure” information. The measure
criminalizes agency disclosures of information provided by
businesses about weaknesses in their systems without the consent of
those businesses. According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom
of the Press, “companies that share information with the
government not only gained the promise that the government will
keep critical infrastructure information secret, they also gained
immunity from civil liability if the information reveals wrongdoing
and immunity from antitrust suits for sharing the information with
the government and each other.”
” The Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness initiative
promises to develop a vast transactional database of personal
information for hunting terrorists. The Electronic Privacy
Information Center filed a request for a temporary order Dec. 17,
asking the judge to overturn the Defense Department’s
decision not to release information about the controversial
project.
” In contrast, the Joint Inquiry into September 11 announced
it will recommend revising government information policies not only
to promote information sharing among government agencies, but also
to expand public access to government information.
In another federal matter, a federal district judge in D.C. threw out the General Accounting Office’s lawsuit that sought access to records generated by Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force. The court said the GAO comptroller’s efforts to compel the vice president to divulge records was “unprecedented” and raised serious separation-of-powers issues. Democrats criticized the ruling because the judge, John D. Bates, was a Republican-appointee to the bench.