Over the past several months, the White House has met with industry representatives to develop a sweeping deregulatory strategy. The White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has given industry a leg-up on the upcoming reauthorization of the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). According to Inside EPA, OIRA has been working with a coalition of industry groups to strategize using the PRA reauthorization as a vehicle for developing new anti-regulatory policies.

Secrecy News reported the next salvo in the debate about the Patriot Act: On May 21, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) [and others] introduced a bill to make the Patriot Act permanent. S. 2476 would repeal sunset provisions of the most controversial sections of the Patriot Act, which are set to expire in 2005. Speaking of Secrecy News, its editor, Steve Aftergood, was recently awarded a prize from the Playboy Foundation and the Creative Coalition for defending the first amendment with his unrelenting and undernoticed efforts to combat government secrecy.

A recent report by the RAND Corporation reveals that information scrubbed from government websites after the Sept. 11 attacks were unnecessary and unproductive in protecting against terrorism. Many government agencies have removed extensive amounts of information from their websites on the remote chance it could be misused by terrorists. The RAND report establishes that the agencies' approach of viewing information only as a threat and not considering the benefits is erroneous.

Members of the House of Representatives interested in public access are pushing for a bill to put all Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports online. This new push comes after the September expiration of a pilot program that provided hundreds of CRS reports to the public on the Internet.