We Must Combat Government Secrecy

"They hate our freedoms," we've been told. Over and over again. Never mind the willful ignorance involved, even using that shallow Bushism as a measuring stick, we're losing the war on terror.

To say "we're losing" is not even controversial, much less news -- if you've been paying attention.

But in this neo-PC era, in which talking about obvious realities in the political arena is considered beyond the pale ("chickens coming home to roost," for example), merely suggesting that "we're losing" will be taken by some readers as an expression of eternal "anti-American" defeatism instead of the realistic assessment that it is; a necessary first step toward the renewal of the Republic.

Exhibit A: Access to information is the cornerstone of a free and open society. I don't think Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Wall Street Journal editorial page lovin' conservatives could disagree with that. Yet, under Bush, access to information has been increasingly restricted in the name of national security at levels never seen before. And it's happening right under our noses.

So, even if you buy into the oversimplified "they hate our freedoms" mindset, the mere fact that since 9/11, America has gone from formal democracy to an official "secretocracy" must have the yet-to-be-captured bin Laden singing praises to Allah.

As former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in his new book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, "keeping the curtains closed and doors locked is never a good idea in government, unless it involves vital matters of national security. Secrecy only encourages people to do things they would prefer others not know about. Openness is critical for accountability."

"The Bush administration lacked real accountability in large part because Bush himself did not embrace openness or government in the sunshine. His belief in secrecy and compartmentalization ... ultimately self-defeating in the age of the internet, blogsphere, and today's heightened media scrutiny."

Last week, an official background paper on the new White House information security policy plan was leaked to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

In essence, the new policy, announced early last month, gives federal agencies the authority to designate many government press releases as "Controlled Unclassified Information" under the guise of "standardizing practices" and safeguarding unclassified government information deemed sensitive.

The official acronym is CUI. On its face, the policy gives federal information officers a single catch-all acronym to replace the various labels individual agencies use to control information i.e. "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." There's about a hundred labels used by Uncle Sam to mark degrees of need-to-knowness.

But, beneath the surface we find this 2006 Congressional testimony from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI): "The great majority of information which is now controlled can be put in a simple unclassified, uncontrolled category, it seems to me," ODNI Information Sharing Environment program manager, Thomas McNamara, testified.

Here's the rub: under the new Bush CUI policy, as Steven Aftergood of FAS notes, the "great majority of the information" McNamara said should be uncontrolled is likely to remain controlled and unavailable to the public.

What if a member of the public (or reporter working as a proxy for Joe and Jane Q. Public) wants information that a federal agency has stamped CUI? According to the White House background paper, that person should submit a Freedom of Information Act request.

Speaking from experience, anyone who has submitted FOIA requests knows the process is anything but timely, cheap or even necessarily fruitful. The current FOIA system is, as my grandmother used to say, slow as molasses in January. (Several years ago I submitted a FOIA request to the Interior Department. It took six months and $360 to get a few hundred pages of fairly innocuous documents).