Barack Obama took office with a pledge of "unprecedented level of openness" in government -- a pledge that his critics on both the left and right have accused him of abandoning. His decision to oppose the release of photos of Iraqi and Afghan detainees being abused by American troops, his insistence that White House visitor logs are exempt from mandatory release under the Freedom of Information Act, and the Justice Department's invocation of the state secrets privilege in cases involving alleged CIA torture have all tended to undercut Obama's pledge, which he expressed in a memo to government employees when he took office.
But according to a new report tracking indicators of government secrecy, it's not all bad news. The 2010 Secrecy Report Card, a project of a coalition of open-government groups called OpenTheGovernment.org, has found that the federal bureaucracy has made some progress in curtailing secrecy.
For instance, the report found that the number of people empowered by the government to classify information as top secret, secret or confidential -- known as "original classification authority" -- is at its lowest level in 17 years, having dropped by 37 percent in 2009 to 2,557 people. Likewise, the total number of decisions those people made to classify documents or information dropped by 10 percent in 2009. (The report covers the last three months of the Bush administration and the first nine months of the Obama administration.) LINK
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