Obama gets mixed secrecy review from watchdog

An annual non-profit watchdog report on federal efforts to keep information a secret finds a mixed record in the Obama administration's first year in office.

The report, issued Sept. 7 by OpenThe-Government.org, examines open source measures of federal secrecy such as the number of classification decisions or pages declassified. Since some of that data is captured according to federal fiscal year, which starts  Oct. 1 (we're currently in the final days of fiscal 2010), the report includes data from the last months of the George W. Bush presidency.

Report data shows that many indicators of secrecy generally decreased in intensity while the amount of information released through declassification also decreased.

Among the report's findings:

• Freedom of Information Act backlogs decreased by 40 percent in fiscal 2009 from fiscal 2008. A significant portion of that drop comes from the Homeland Security Department, which reduced its backlog from 74,879 requests in fiscal 2008 to 18,981 in fiscal 2009.
• The number of persons with original classification authority decreased by 38 percent in fiscal 2009 from fiscal 2008, down to 2,557 persons (click for table).
• The number of National Security Letters--a government demand for information issued without a warrant, a demand that until recently also came with a gag order--decreased by 40 percent in calendar year 2009 from calendar year 2008, down to 14,788 (click for table).
• The number of government surveillance requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for persons inside the United States decreased by 34 percent in calendar year 2009 from calendar year 2008, down to 1,376 (click for table).

But, while the number of original classification decisions decreased by nearly 10 percent in fiscal 2009 from fiscal 2008 to 183,224, the number of document pages declassified also declined by about 8 percent, to 28.8 million pages (click for a table). In all, the government spent $196 during fiscal 2009 on maintaining existing secrets for every $1 spent declassifying documents, the report states, for a total of $8.81 billion spent on the classification system.

The report does not measure some of the impact of Obama's Open Government Initiative has had. Although it does promote FOIA responsiveness among federal agencies, it also encourages them to be transparent in ways not measured in the report, such as making data available to the public.

For more:
- download the OpenTheGovernment.org 2010 Secrecy Report Card (.pdf) or read the press release

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