Clint Hendler discusses government secrecy in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. (They haven't posted this issue yet on their site, cjr.org/magazine.) Two areas were interesting to me - presidential records and the flouting of federal law regarding our right to know what is going on in our government that is spending our money.
It didn't start with George W.. but our presidents seem to have the same attitude towards the Presidential Records Act, one requirement of which is that ex-presidents give up control of their administration's records twelve years after leaving office. Simply stated, they don't want to do it. Clinton fought to keep George One's records private after the twelve year period. George Two has issued an executive order to keep Reagan's and George Two's records unavailable to us. Two's order also gave the heirs of past presidents and vice presidents teh right to withhold their ancestor's records from public scrutiny.
The law defines three levels of secrecy relative to records - top secret, secret and confidential - limits the number of agencies and people that can make these classifications and names a branch of the National Archives as the overseer of the process. You can guess what has happened.
The people running our government decided that there was a need for another class - sensitive but unclassified - of information that could be shielded from, more agencies were authorized to keep their information classified and the National Archives was no longer the sole arbiter.
Government of the people, by the people and for the people?
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