The White House last week issued a long-awaited policy on “controlled unclassified information” (CUI) to provide a uniform government-wide system for safeguarding unclassified information that is deemed sensitive.
The CUI framework is supposed to replace the numerous individual agency control markings — “sensitive but unclassified,” “for official use only,” and over a hundred other designations — and thereby to overcome barriers to information sharing within the government.
But the new policy will do nothing to restore public access to government records that have been improperly withheld. ...
In other words, restrictions on freedom of access to unclassified government documents will continue under new rules -- billed as "reform" -- which simply extend those unreasonable restrictions.
It establishes a single CUI framework, with three graduated levels of sensitivity and security. But the definition of what information may qualify as CUI, which includes anything that “under law or policy” requires protection from unauthorized disclosure, is vague and expansive.
To put it another way, the CUI policy does not exclude anything that is currently controlled as Sensitive But Unclassified.
"Sensitive But Unclassified" is one of those Orwellian labels which, if you were to probe its application, would turn out to cover things like "embarrassing to Rove," or "bad public relations for the Office of the Vice President."
More details can be found at Secrecy News. In a commentary at Daily Kos, Smintheus notes that "this new memo represents the opposite of reform."
In a related development, noted by Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, the Washington Times has an editorial from Nat Hentoff which rightly questions the virtual absence of attention to a Senate Judiciary Committee a couple of weeks ago about these very issues or, more to the point, about the administration's abuse of the Constitution. Hentoff writes:
So important was an April 30 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution that it should have been on front pages around the country. Titled "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government" and chaired by Sen. Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat. it focused on an issue ignored by the presidential contenders that has deeply weakened our rule of law.
Said witness Steve Aftergood, secrecy authority at the Federation of American Scientists: Growing use of secret law "is implicated in fundamental political controversies over domestic surveillance, torture and many other issues directly affecting the lives and interests of Americans ... Secret law excludes the public from the deliberative process, promotes arbitrary and deviant government behavior, and shields official malefactors from accountability."
At this very Senate hearing, John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel's deputy assistant attorney general, provided a startling example of the Bush administration's justification for the imperious essence of secret law. As reported in the May 1 New York Times, Mr. Elwood "disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities."
The Bush administration believes, he said, "that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation."
Vladimir Putin would agree with that — but is this America?
Here's where we, the supporters of candidates and the voters, come in. Here's where it's up to us.
This is also a central question for Sens. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain: Is the next president willing to continue this degree and extent of kingly secrecy, in which the Justice Department will be deeply complicit?
And my direct question to Mr. McCain: Will he continue Mr. Mukasey as U.S. attorney general, who has yet to utter a critical word about President Bush's unprecedented expansion of presidential powers that is nurtured by "secret law?"
If anyone wants to know why Bob Barr would appeal to those on the right, left and center, the answer lies in the silence from presidential candidates of both major parties on these crucial issues.
