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In October 2001, the Bush administration took an administrative action that would prove sadly symptomatic of its rule. John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, issued a memorandum warning against casual release of information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. Such releases, Ashcroft said, should be made "only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests that could be implicated." In case anyone missed the point, Ashcroft added that any bureaucrat who said no to such a request could "be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis." It goes without saying that Ashcroft did not promise any such defense of government employees who released information under the terms of the act. If cavalier disregard of the law and the public's right to hold its government accountable were hallmarks of the recently departed administration, we can only hope that President Obama's response signals a new approach. One of his first presidential acts was to issue a memo to federal agencies on the Freedom of Information Act. It opens by quoting former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' pronouncement that sunlight is the "best of disinfectants" and continues by trumpeting the act as "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government." Where Ashcroft searched for excuses to withhold information, Obama directed all agencies to "adopt a presumption" in favor of releasing it.

Proof that George Bush was actually protecting us by limiting access to government information!

At the National Archives and Records Administration's annual conference Thursday, one keynote speaker asked the crowd of several hundred how many of the archivists in attendance were sold on the use of social media. Only a smattering raised their hands. Clearly, it's a challenge for the government to figure out how to navigate complex archival and e-discovery regulations that require it to capture and store all sorts of new content in the age of social media, cloud computing, and seemingly endless storage. "The federal government is in a constantly evolving records environment," Adrienne Thomas, acting archivist of the United States, said in a luncheon speech to the conference. "These are exciting and challenging times." Obama administration ambitions toward cloud computing and more openness only make that issue more complicated. "Many of us in the federal records administrations have struggled with the implications of this new direction," Paul Wester, director of modern records programs at the National Archives, said in an interview. "We deeply believe in transparency and openness, but we are concerned about FOIA, HIPAA, the Privacy Act, personally identifiable information, and compliance with the Disability Act and Federal Records Act."

"Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies? That's the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public. Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it "to 'shame' Yahoo! and other companies - and to 'shock' their customers.""

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it sued the Justice Department and other U.S. agencies to get information about their policies for using social networks including Facebook and Twitter in investigations, data collection and surveillance. The civil rights group said in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in San Francisco that the government has used social-networking sites in conducting investigations and hasn't clarified the scope of that use or whether there are any restrictions or oversight to prevent abuses. The EFF said in its complaint that it is seeking the information to "help inform Congress and the public about the effect of such uses and purposes on citizens' privacy rights and associated legal protections." It cited news articles that reported police searching Facebook photos for evidence of underage drinking and an FBI search of an individual's home after the person sent messages on Twitter during the G-20 Summit notifying protesters of police movements. Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, is the world's largest social networking site with more than 300 million users who post photos, messages and other information on their own free Facebook pages. Twitter, based in San Francisco, is a free Web service with 58 million users that lets people send 140- character messages, called "tweets," to multiple followers. EFF, also based in San Francisco, filed Freedom of Information Act requests with federal agencies in October. None of the agencies had completed processing the requests by the applicable 20-day deadline, according to the complaint. The lawsuit seeks a court order for the government to process the requests and produce documents."