US government secrecy is on the rise by almost every measure, a report by a coalition of government oversight groups said.
They said the US was classifying more records as top secret or otherwise confidential and employing fewer workers who make federal documents available publicly.
“The open society on which we pride ourselves has been undermined and will take hard work to repair,” said the report, described as a “secrecy report card” by OpenTheGovernment.org. It cited 14 different measurements to quantify government secrecy, including patents hidden from the public, secret court approvals for surveillance in sensitive terrorism and espionage investigations and the expanding use of informal labels to keep documents from being disclosed.
The group said there was an 80 percent decline over the last decade in the number of pages of records declassified, dropping last year to 37 million pages. Such declassifications peaked in the Clinton administration, with the opening of 204 million pages in 1997. The findings were based on the government’s own figures.
The late 1990s marked a push to clear out a huge backlog of decades-old documents that should have been declassified long before, said Bill Leonard, a former government expert on classified documents.
“There’s less emphasis now on declassification, not the same level of zealotry to declassify as there used to be,” said Leonard, who retired this year from the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives.
Without citing any law passed by Congress, federal agencies are restricting access to many unclassified documents by marking them “sensitive.” US President George W. Bush gave the practice his imprimatur in May. There is a move in Congress to rein in what the administration is doing.
Close to 65 percent of the 7,000 federal advisory committee meetings last year were closed to the public, a figure that appears sharply at odds with Congress’ intent when it passed the law in 1972 governing how such committees should operate.
Only one-third of requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) were fully granted last year, the lowest figure in at least 10 years. During the Clinton administration, more than half of FOIA requests were fully granted. The shift is reflected in the growing number of almost completely blacked-out pages of material released by the government to members of the public or news organizations.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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