Thursday, March 17, 2005

The Oxygen Of Democracy

Information is the oxygen of democracy. Day by day, the Bush administration is cutting off the supply.
An excellent article from Slate describing how the Bush administration is limiting our access to information; even information that was once in the public domain!
[G]overnment information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official databases. Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." Less of a goal-directed policy than a bureaucratic reflex, the widespread clampdown on formerly public information reflects a largely inarticulate concern about "security." It also accords neatly with the Bush administration's preference for unchecked executive authority.

No comprehensive catalog of deleted information exists, which is part of the problem. What follows is a representative selection of categories of data that have been withdrawn from public access in the Bush years, with reflections on what they mean...
Please read the entire article here.