The DOJ Office of Information and Privacy FOIA Post website published a statement presenting its perspective on the recent Executive Order on National Security Classification Amended.
On March 27, I posted a link to, and related resources on, Executive Order 12958, As Amended, Classified National Security Information. For futher reference, the Federation of American Scientists published “the final line-in/line-out version of Executive Order 13292 indicating the changes made to the predecessor order 12958.” This is a valuable resource, as it facilitates a review of the context and extent of the new restrictions on public access to government documents. For the purpose of comparison, the organization also provided a link to the “clean copy of EO 13292,” as well as a link to an op-ed on the ramifications of this order, by Steven Aftergood. Mr. Aftergood states that “information is the oxygen of democracy. Without robust, reliable access to government information, members of the public cannot function intelligently as citizens, cannot meaningfully participate in the policy process and cannot adequately evaluate the performance of their elected representatives or hold the government institutions accountable.”