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Secrecy Check: Security Clearance Numbers Appear to Grow; Exact Number Still Murky

For the past three years, one aspect of the growth of the classified universe has been indicated by the number of security clearances. On October 1, 2012 personnel deemed eligible for clearance numbered 4,917,751, a 1.1 percent growth from the year before. Of course, these numbers do not tell the whole story. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is required to report on the number of personnel “deemed eligible” for clearance, not the number of personnel granted access to classified information. Employees are given access on a “need to know” basis. Apparently, ODNI does not think the public needs to know that information. We disagree: an increase in clearances means more individuals who could derivatively classify documents, funneling more classified documents into an already overloaded and broken declassification system.

04/16/2013

House Intel Committee Says Openness on Cyber would be Inconvenient

On Wednesday April 10, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence amended the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), HR 624, and passed the bill out of the Committee.

04/16/2013

Progress and “Next Steps” on Open Government? Thoughts on the Administration's NAP Self-Evaluation

Both civil society and the government have released reports on what was accomplished through the National Action Plan issued in September 2011. Both reports share one critically important finding: for nearly all the commitments, there remains work to be done and further lessons to be learned. Open government, you could say, is not built in a single year.

04/10/2013

A Deep Dive in the US' National Action Plan: Setting Milestones and Standards

OpenTheGovernment.org is taking deep dives into civil society’s evaluation of the implementation of the US National Action Plan, and taking a look at the lessons learned from the government’s self-assessment. During the evaluation process, a few teams grappled with addressing commitments that were vague, long-finished, or unevenly and incompletely implemented across agencies.

04/10/2013

A 100 Day Agenda for Open Government?

In February our Executive Director took to the pages of The Hill to challenge President Obama to recommit to creating an "unprecedented level of openness in Government" during his second term. She outlined a 100-day agenda to put the US on the path to accomplishing this goal. With more than half of the 100 days gone, we thought it would be an appropriate time to look at what the government has made progress on, and what issues remain to be tackled.

04/05/2013

Groups to Congress: Don't Mark Up CISPA in Secret

On April 3rd, more than 40 organizations, including OpenTheGovernment.org and several of our partners and allies, joined in sending a letter to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to urge them to make the mark up of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), planned for the week of April 8 open to the public.

04/03/2013

A Deep Dive in the US' National Action Plan: Open Government Plans

In a recently released evaluation of the Administration's efforts to implement the Nation Action Plan, we note that the government's efforts could more correctly be labeled as "first steps" rather than the needed "leaps forward." We hope to give you a better sense of why we came to this conclusion by taking a deeper dive into the evaluation of the government's efforts for a few of these commitments. Now up: Open Government Plans.

04/03/2013

Important Win by CREW on FOIA Processing

Our friends at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) won a major victory today in their ongoing case against the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) that will help maintain what the ruling refers to as the "comprehensive scheme" in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that "encourages prompt request-processing and agency accountability.&qu

04/02/2013

Great Expectations and Growing Pains for FOIAonline

As many of our readers know, we think that the FOIAonline requester and management system has great potential. This fall we decided to test those expectations by launching a project comparing the requester experience of FOIAonline and the disparate systems of the 14 agencies that receive the highest number of requests each year.

04/02/2013

Still No One Held Accountable for CIA's Destruction of Torture Records

Recent news that one of the two CIA employees who authorized the destruction of tapes showing the torture of CIA detainees – despite a court order to preserve them – has been placed in charge of the CIA’s clandestine service is yet another slap in the face for the rule of law and government accountability.

03/27/2013

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