FOIA, federal information policy, and information availability in a post-9/11 world
By: FEINBERG, Lotte E
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ArticlePublisher: Orlando : Elsevier, 2004Government Information Quarterly 21, 4, p. 439-460Abstract: Access to government records is increasingly shifting to a nether world-governed neither by the FOIA and the Privacy Act, nor by an executive order on classification. Instead, new categories of records, labeled sensitive but unclassified, for official use only, or critical infrastructure information, are being created in a variety of agencies, and are governed by agency regulations. Statutory authority is found in a number of separate laws, such as the Homeland Security Act and the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. These categories can be assigned by agency officials, contractors, or those in the private sector who originated the records; many records categorized this way are not subject to appeal or review by agencies or the courts, or to any automatic declassification process that has applied to documents withheld under the FOIA or subject to classification. Trends toward increased secrecy at all levels of government have become sufficiently alarming that individuals across the political spectrum have begun to speak out, and members of the access community (e.g., newspaper editors and public interest groups) have formed coalitions to focus debate on the need to rethink the balance of access with privacy and records protection, and to lobby actively for reinstatement of principles of access that have governed records policy for the past 35 years
Access to government records is increasingly shifting to a nether world-governed neither by the FOIA and the Privacy Act, nor by an executive order on classification. Instead, new categories of records, labeled sensitive but unclassified, for official use only, or critical infrastructure information, are being created in a variety of agencies, and are governed by agency regulations. Statutory authority is found in a number of separate laws, such as the Homeland Security Act and the Aviation and Transportation Security Act. These categories can be assigned by agency officials, contractors, or those in the private sector who originated the records; many records categorized this way are not subject to appeal or review by agencies or the courts, or to any automatic declassification process that has applied to documents withheld under the FOIA or subject to classification. Trends toward increased secrecy at all levels of government have become sufficiently alarming that individuals across the political spectrum have begun to speak out, and members of the access community (e.g., newspaper editors and public interest groups) have formed coalitions to focus debate on the need to rethink the balance of access with privacy and records protection, and to lobby actively for reinstatement of principles of access that have governed records policy for the past 35 years
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