PARANOIA

Looking for new info-denial phrases beyond "That information is not available at your security clearance"? University of California history professor Jon Wiener reports in the January 6, 2007 Los Angeles Times (via Alternet) that the United States government automatically declassified 270 million pages of FBI files on December 31, 2006. Except, well, not really:

Declassification, it turns out, is not the same as release. Some documents will remain classified, and others will be declassified but still withheld. [President] Bush's executive order specifies nine grounds for exemptions, and dozens of other existing laws restrict the release of certain kinds of information.

Many restrictions are reasonable: The Privacy Act, for instance, prohibits release to a third party of any government information on a living person -- so I can't get your FBI file, and you can't get mine. The Atomic Energy Act protects information on how to build nuclear weapons.

Some of the exemptions, however, are more troublesome and can easily provide excuses to agencies that want to keep secrets. One, for instance, covers information that might "reveal the identity of a confidential human source."

Obviously, people who have been promised confidentiality should not have their names released. But the FBI has extended that principle (which is also part of the Freedom of Information Act) to cover not just the names of sources but also the information they provided. The bureau argued that release of the information might lead a knowledgeable person to figure out the source's identity. On this basis, all information provided by all confidential sources could be withheld. [...]

Thus the policy known as "automatic declassification" does not in fact mean that 25-year-old national security information will be automatically declassified. It means that the material must be, in the words of the Justice Department, "reviewed for declassification, exemption, and/or referral to other government agencies."

Read the full article for three or four more choice excuses to offer Troubleshooters standing in line at the local office of CPU's Data Disbursal Justification and Correction Bureau.

The biggest obstacle: "Documents that are deemed releasable are to be sent to the National Archives, which is then supposed to make them available to the public. But the National Archives already has a backlog of 400 million pages. Oh, and its budget for next year has been cut."

But at least these documents are declassified. That makes loyal citizens happy.