Earlier this month, the Washington Post ran a story about the intelligence community’s efforts to push legislators to amend the Intelligence Authorization Act (S. 1494) to exempt “terrorist identity information (TII)” from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).  Currently, this information is marked as Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) with a stamp that reads “for official use only” but the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) made claims that the information could readily be requested under FOIA with little protection.  We have proof that these claims were ridiculous.

Today, OpenTheGovernment.org released its 2009 Secrecy Report Card.  The report makes use of most quantitative indicators currently available to compare the Obama and Bush administrations.  While it is too early to effectively compare the two administrations the report notes a slight decrease in secrecy levels during the end of the Bush administration.  Further, while the Obama administration is pursuing a promise of unprecidented openness the results are mixed.

On Aug. 24, the Washington Independent published a new version of a redacted 2004 report by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson on the agency’s so-called “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities.”  The report was previously released in 2008 to the National Security Archive but remained mostly classified.  The 2009 release, made in accordance with an order by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in an ACLU FOIA lawsuit, uncover new details of the CIA’s secretive torture programs.