Part-Time Policy Wonk

From OMB Watch:
The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today that the White House Office of Administration (OA) does not need to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith, writing for the 3-0 majority, concluded: “the Office of Administration is not [covered by FOIA] because it performs [...]

From OMB Watch:
The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today that the White House Office of Administration (OA) does not need to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
Circuit Judge Thomas Griffith, writing for the 3-0 majority, concluded: “the Office of Administration is not [covered by FOIA] because it performs [...]

From CNN:
President Obama said Wednesday he told government lawyers to object to a court-ordered release of additional images showing alleged abuse of detainees because the release could affect the safety of U.S. troops and “inflame anti-American opinion.”
Releasing the photos could have a “chilling effect” on further investigations of detainee abuse without adding to the understanding [...]

From MSNBC:
The Federal Aviation Administration is proposing to keep secret from travelers and the public its vast records on how frequently and where commercial planes are damaged by hitting flying birds.
The agency’s formal secrecy proposal came just after FAA officials had said they were going to release the huge database to The Associated Press in [...]

From Secrecy News:
The Central Intelligence Agency maintains a regularly updated electronic archive of declassified historical records that have been publicly disclosed, but it has effectively squandered the utility of digitizing these records by refusing to make them available online.
The CIA to its credit has done more than any other agency to scan declassified records into [...]

From Wired:
Government agencies across the country are sitting on gigabytes of valuable digital data that could be mashed, mixed and re-organized in crafty ways by Web 2.0 entrepreneurs and public interest groups engaged in everything from government oversight, to providing practical information to Americans.
Yet, despite federal and state public records laws designed to make the [...]

From CNET:
Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.
Now President Obama’s White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a [...]

From Bloomberg:
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on bailout loans to financial institutions and won’t make the information public, the central bank said in a reply to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.
The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on [...]

From the National Security Archive:
The Justice Department this week missed the opportunity to bring transparency to the controversy over deleted White House e-mail from the Bush administration by allowing briefing to continue on a motion that had been developed by the Bush Administration.
The motion, filed by the Justice Department on January 21, just after the [...]

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is withholding hundreds of documents about a secret intellectual property enforcement treaty currently under negotiation between the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries.