House and Senate conferees last week approved legislation that would preempt the Freedom of Information Act and permit the Secretary of Defense to withhold from release photographs and other visual media if he determines that their public disclosure “would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States.”

The new provision, contained in the 2010 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, was adopted to thwart a successful FOIA lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking release of certain photographs documenting the abuse of detainees held in U.S. military custody.

The Harper government has quietly nixed recommendations to expand and modernize Canada’s access-to-information and privacy laws.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s rejection of reforms to the 26-year-old laws sparked accusations Thursday that the Tories have reneged on campaign promises to bring openness and transparency to the federal government.

After the Federal Election Commission (FEC) formulated a rule on reporting campaign contributions bundled by lobbyists, many were concerned that it was too narrow and would not quite capture very much information. Now, we see those points were not misguided. The situations under which a member of Congress is legally required to disclose a lobbyist’s fundraising are limited. A recent analysis from the Associated Press found that only a few members of Congress are disclosing bundled contributions from lobbyists.

President Obama ordered federal officials to disclose their contacts with lobbyists trying to influence how the government doles out money to jump-start the economy. Yet few such communications have been reported even though lobbyists say they are busier than ever with the multibillion-dollar stimulus.

OMB Watch has a chart listing the agencies reporting communications with lobbyists.

The Obama administration wants to maintain the secrecy of terrorist watch-list information it routinely shares with federal, state and local agencies, a move that rights groups say would make it difficult for people who have been improperly included on such lists to challenge the government.

Intelligence officials in the administration are pressing for legislation that would exempt “terrorist identity information” from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

A Supreme Court filing from the Obama administration last month has set off alarm bells on the left.
The filing was a friend-of-the-court brief, and it mostly dealt with an excruciatingly technical question about the attorney-client privilege. But its last five pages were about the state secrets privilege, which was not at issue in the case. That privilege, a favorite tool of the Bush administration, allows the government to shut down lawsuits by invoking national security.
The Obama administration’s brief argued, though no one had asked, that the state secrets privilege was rooted in the Constitution.

Although 28 members of the California Assembly supported a measure to allow new oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast, their votes are nowhere to be found in the official state database.
After the measure failed, Assembly leaders expunged the vote altogether, sparing lawmakers running for reelection an official record of their controversial decision. The voting logs made available to the public on the Legislature’s website do not indicate who voted for and against the bill on July 24.

Even though certain information concerning the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) was redacted and declassified for use in the prosecution of former vice presidential aide Scooter Libby in 2006, that same information is nonetheless “currently and properly classified,” the Central Intelligence Agency said (pdf) last week. The Agency denied release of the material under the Freedom of Information Act.

A U.S. judge on Thursday denied a bid by Fox News Network LLC seeking details from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve about the central bank’s loans to companies affected by the financial crisis.
The owner of the Fox Business cable network made an initial request for documents in November last year under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) about the companies and funds they received between August 2007 and November 2008.
Both parties had filed motions with U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan federal court to rule in their favor after Fox filed its request to the court in January.

Notwithstanding official proclamations of a new era of transparency, public access to declassified historical records continues to be obstructed by procedural potholes, limited resources for processing records, competing priorities and, sometimes, bad faith.
At the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), declassified files that used to be open to the public have been withdrawn indefinitely so that they may reviewed for inadvertent releases of classified nuclear weapons-related information, pursuant to the 1999 “Kyl-Lott” Amendment. Nearly all Navy records there dating from the 1960s forward are now completely unavailable to the public, said historians Larry Berman of UC Davis and William Burr of the National Security Archive.
The blanket closure of entire collections, they suggested in an April 29 letter (pdf), is “wholly inconsistent with the spirit of the new presidential administration.”