The State Department has released a February 2006 internal memo from Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, opposing Justice Department authorization for "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA. All copies of the memo, which reflect strong internal disagreement within the George W. Bush administration over the constitutionality of such techniques, were thought to have been destroyed. But the State Department located a copy and declassified it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive.

• The Zelikow Memo: Internal Critique of Bush Torture Memos Declassified, National Security Archive, George Washington University (April 3, 2012).
• Approving Torture and Destroying Documents: More Notes on the "Zelikow Memo", by Nate Jones, Unredacted, the National Security Archive blog (April 4, 2012).
• Document Friday: The Torture Memos, We Now Know, by Nate Jones, Unredacted, the National Security Archive blog (April 6, 2012).
• CIA Committed ‘War Crimes,’ Bush Official Says, By Spencer Ackerman, Wired "Danger Room" blog (April 4, 2012).

In honor of Sunshine Week the Sunlight Foundation has created Back to the Source: REDACTED in which they take original investigative articles and manually black out all the information that would not be known without existing transparency measures. It is worth taking a look at just how little we would know with the Freedom of Information Act and other public disclosure laws.

• Back to the Source REDACTED: The Impact of Disclosure on Public News & Knowledge, by Melanie Buck, Sunlight Foundation (March 14, 2012).

  While journalistic skill and technique are essential for writing a good investigative article, we often take it for granted that journalists have access to the information they need to write complex news stories. Without publicly available data, much of our news would not be possible. We've been looking at investigative articles as part of an ongoing series called "Back to the Source" for the last several months. Now we've decided to amp it up a bit and make redacted visuals to explicitly demonstrate how little the public would know without laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available.

"In an opinion published this week, DC District Judge Richard W. Roberts did an astonishing thing that federal courts almost never do: He probed into the decision to classify a government document and concluded that it was not well-founded. He ordered the agency to release the document under the Freedom of Information Act." (Aftergood)

• Court Says Agency Classification Decision is Not "Logical". by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (March 2nd, 2012)
• Judge issues rare order to release classified document. By Josh Gerstein, Politico (2/29/12).

Our friends at OMBWatch just published an interesting post highlighting several studies that compare and contrast the policy and practice of transparency of the US and other countries based on comparative analysis of FOIA, foreign aid, and budgets and revenues. The post, entitled "Global Studies Highlight U.S. Transparency Strengths, Weaknesses" "...provide[s] useful measures of U.S. openness relative to real-world conditions, in addition to highlighting global best practices and alternative approaches." It also references a group created in September 2011 called the Open Government Partnership (OGP) and highlights the US' role in the group and their joint Open Government Declaration signed by the US and 7 other countries -- with 38 more countries signing in March 2012. Read the rest of the post to find out where the US ranks among the countries of the world in terms of transparency and open government.

Here's the list of studies cited by OMBwatch:

• audit of FOIA laws in 105 countries and the European Union by the Associated Press (AP)
• Global Right to Information Rating released by Access Info Europe and the Centre for Law and Democracy
• Quality of Official Development Assistance report, published Nov. 14 by the Brookings Institution and the Center for Global Development
• "The Money Trail: Ranking Donor Transparency in Foreign Aid" by Anirban Ghosh and Homi Kharas, published in the November issue of the journal World Development (available to subscribers only :-( )
• Aid Transparency Index 2011 by the organization Publish What You Fund

Our Sunlight friend John Wonderlich provides some in-depth context for the Department of Justice's proposed new FOIA rules and from the blog title it's easy to guess what those new rules look like -- "Justice Department's New FOIA Regulations: Still Worse than Reported". Wonderlich's colleague Daniel Schuman created a side-by-side comparison of current and proposed new regulations, to help illuminate the differences.

Instead of obfuscating regulations and making them more restrictive, DoJ lawyers should be trying to simplify and expand the scope of FOIA in line with the Obama Administration's stated goals and Open Government Initiative. Otherwise, the rhetoric of "an unprecedented level of openness in government" and the establishment of "a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration" will ring hollow or worse.

The DOJ sent a letter to respond to Congressional concerns about their lying about the existence of records. The letter hardly paints a clear picture, but basically says that the DOJ will withdraw a section of the proposed regulations, but that their conduct won't change, and that they'll continue to mislead requesters about whether records exist or not.

Unmentioned in the letter, however, are all the steps backward on FOIA that the DOJ is proposing in their rules. In a package completely at odds with President Obama and Attorney General Holder's public FOIA rhetoric, the new DOJ rules throw up new roadblocks and hurdles to requesters, and generally make it easier to deny requests. One has to wonder what possible motivation DOJ has for forcing elementary schools to pay for FOIA requests, where they used to qualify for fee waivers. Have elementary school students' FOI requests become a burden?

This is a fascinating look into conflict of interest within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) -- which always reminds me of Pogo the comic: "we have met the enemy and he is us" :-) -- they sent a letter to DARPA which prompted an investigation into DARPA Director Regina Dugan's possible conflict of interest in awarding contracts to a company she used to own and which is now run by her father:

The Department of Defense Inspector General (IG) is auditing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and looking into financial ties of DARPA Director Regina Dugan after POGO called for an investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the agency.

The audits will cover two areas: all of DARPA's contracts and grants from the last two years and a special look at the contracts awarded to RedXDefense, a bomb detection firm founded by Dugan and currently run by Dugan’s father. The Pentagon IG explained the audits in a letter to POGO sent on Friday.

In addition to having family ties to the company, Dugan still has a financial relationship with RedXDefense.

“RedXDefense owes Dugan $250,000 for a “loan/note” and additionally details that she has between $151,000 and $305,000 in assets and income from RedXDefense,” we said in a May 9, 2011, letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General.

here's more explanation from Wired's Spencer Ackerman, who tracks these types of issues via the Wired Danger Room blog.

[HT to Ellen Miller at Sunlight Foundation for this tidbit!]

In a recent court decision the National Security Agency acknowledged working "with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates" but it obtained from the court the right to keep secret documents that may, or may not, show a working relationship with Google.

• NSA spooks win fight to keep secret possible ties to Google, by Mike Doyle, Suits & Sentences legal affairs blog, McClatchy Newspapers (July 13, 2011).

  In a decision made public Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon denied a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the curious souls at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC sought documents relating to NSA's possible relationship with Google following news of an alleged cyber attack by hackers in China and of a subsequent cooperation agreement between Google and NSA.

• EPIC v. NSA: Agency Can "Neither Confirm Nor Deny" Google Ties, EPIC (July 13, 2011).

The archived email messages were released earlier today and are now beginning to roll out into searchable databases and/or PDF files.

Scanned pages are being added to databases as they become available. Many news organization are asking the public for assistance in reviewing all of the pages. Yet another example of crowdsourcing government records.

Here are three of several source provin

1. NY Times
Search NY Times: Palin E-Mail Search
http://projects.nytimes.com/palin-emails/date/2008-08-01

2. MSNBC/Mother Jones/ProPublica
Search: MSNBC/Mother Jones/ProPublica
http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com/

Updates at @openchannelblog and #palinemail

MSNBC Live Blog With Additional Information as it Becomes Available. Also, info about documents being withheld.
http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/06/10/6825771-heres-your-liv...

Background from Bill Dedman at MSNBC
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/43281157/ns/politics-more_politics/

3. Washington Post
PDF Files of Raw Email Messages (#1)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/palin-emails/pdf/D...

Additional Material
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/sarah-palin-emails/post/for-micro-up...

So the CIA just got around to declassifying 6 of the U.S.'s oldest classified documents from WWI (1917 + 1918). They've posted them in their CIA FOIA reading room and the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) at the National Archives (but to use CREST, a researcher must physically be present at the National Archives, College Park, Maryland :-|). That also means that the documents will also soon be available at the archive-it FOIA collection (I'm harvesting them as we speak ;-)).

These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA's purview to declassify.

"These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. "When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people."

One document outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another memorandum dated June 14, 1918 - written in French - reveals the formula used for German secret ink.

"The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public," said Joseph Lambert, the Agency's Director of Information Management Services. "In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents."These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA's purview to declassify.

"These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. "When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people."

One document outlines the chemicals and techniques necessary for developing certain types of secret writing ink and a method for opening sealed letters without detection. Another memorandum dated June 14, 1918 - written in French - reveals the formula used for German secret ink.

"The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public," said Joseph Lambert, the Agency's Director of Information Management Services. "In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents."

Declassified CIA documents (all pdf):

• Document 1
• Document 2
• Document 3
• Document 4 -- This is the one with the steps for checking for invisible ink.
• Document 5
• Document 6

This was such cool news that Rachel Maddow went gaga over the news!

[HT to Gary Price for posting CIA Declassifies Oldest Documents in U.S. Government Collection (1917 + 1918), View Them Online on InfoDocket. Thanks Gary!]

The Vault is a new "electronic reading room" at fbi.gov. It contains more than 2,000 documents that have been scanned from paper into digital copies including more than 25 new files that have been released to the public but never added to the FBI website, dozens of records previously posted but removed as requests diminished, and files from the FBI's previous electronic reading room.

Check out:

• Jane Addams
• Eliot Ness
• Malcolm X
• Groucho Marx
• Roswell UFO

etc...

Hat tip to Sabrina I. Pacifici: FBI Launches New Electronic Reading Room, (April 03, 2011).