Attorney General John Ashcroft has issued a new statement of policy that encourages federal agencies to resist Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests whenever they have legal grounds to do so.

The new statement supersedes a 1993 memorandum from Attorney General Janet Reno which promoted disclosure of government information through the FOIA unless it was "reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful."

The Ashcroft policy rejects this "foreseeable harm" standard.

Instead, the Justice Department instructs agencies to withhold information whenever there is a "sound legal basis" for doing so.

"When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part," the Attorney General advised, "you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis...."

The new FOIA policy statement, issued October 12, 2001, is posted here.

For purposes of comparison, Attorney General Reno's 1993 memorandum may be found here.

As with many of the Bush Administration's new restrictions on public information, the new policy is only peripherally related to the fight against terrorism. Rather, it appears to exploit the current circumstances to advance a predisposition toward official secrecy.

If interested in reading some truthful news about our government, check out U.S. Dept. of State FOIA Electronic Reading Room - Document Collections and also U.S. Department of State - Countries and Regions.

Under the Bush administration, three new agencies have been given the power to stamp documents "Secret"— the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Health and Human Services.   According to The New York Times, in the year that ended September 30, 2001, 18 percent more documents were classified than the previous year.

Information has been removed from a number of government websites since September 11:

• The Environmental Protection Agency has removed information about risk to adjacent residents from chemical factories and nuclear power plants, according to Mary Graham, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institute, in her book, Democracy by Disclosure.
  
  
• Statements describing studies that show there is no link between breast cancer and abortion were erased from the National Cancer Institute website in June and replaced with statements that the evidence is unclear.
  
  
• The Centers for Disease Control site no longer includes a fact sheet on studies showing that condoms help prevent transmission of HIV and that education about condoms does not lead to earlier or increased sexual activity. Fourteen Democratic members of Congress wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson protesting the change.
  
  
• In May 2002. the Department of Education issued a memo drafted in February 2001 that directs removal from its website of information that "runs counter to current Administration priorities," according to the Association of Educational Research Libraries. The assocation warns that as many as 13,000 of the more than 50,000 documents on the website are in jeopardy
  
  
• One of the most arcane, yet far reaching, decisions is an Office of Management and Budget policy that printing of federal documents no longer must be done through the Government Printing Office (GPO). The GPO catalogs every document, ensuring that the public has access to them. Without this cataloging, the THERE WILL be a rise in what librarians call "fugitive documents"—documents the government issued, and a citizen may even knov exist, but which there is no way of finding.
  
  
• In 2001, President Bush issued an order allowing former presides and vice presidents like his father to prevent release of presidential documents. The Public Interest Litigation Group sued on behalf of historians and reporters; the suit is still pending and legislation introduced in Congress to undo the order did not make it to a vote, according to The New York Times.
  
  
• In March 2002, the Defense Department issued plans to limit publication of unclassified research it finances and restrict access by non-US citizens to its data and research facilities. After protests from scientists, the Defense DEPARTMENT WITHDREW THE PLANS.
  
  
• In November 2002, the Department of Energy discontinued PubScience, which made scientific articles publicly available via the web.
  
  
• On Christmas Eve 2002, the administration announced that it was canceling a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs at US companies.

To learn more about information access, see www.ala.org/washoff and www.ombwatch.org, which maintains an inventory of information removal from government websites since 9/11.