Earlier this afternoon the Department of Justice and Attorney General Eric Holder celebrated Sunshine Week by highlighting the federal government's progress "in realizing the promise of the Freedom of Information Act." Holder and four additional speakers pointed out what they called positive steps taken in 2011 to reduce request backlogs, improve processes, and operate under a "presumption of openness." This positive news was tempered by today's Associated Press report that indicates that the federal government is still struggling with FOIA backlogs.

In touting the Department's accomplishments, Holder  looked toward the future and presented some improvements to FOIA currently being instituted by the DOJ. He announced  the DOJ will start posting monthly logs of FOIA requests made to senior leadership offices. The logs will "publicly identify the subject matter and disposition of each request" in an attempt to make it easier for people to locate information they are interested in. The department is also working on a new way for the public to submit and track FOIA requests to the DOJ's senior leadership online.

Additionally, the department is rolling out two new tools in an attempt to make FOIA.gov more responsive; a simplified government-wide search function and an integrated FOIA request process.

Four speakers from across the federal government joined Holder and touted the progress their offices made on FOIA issues

• Carolyn Colvin, Deputy Commissioner at the Social Security Administration, spoke to the SSA's successful implementation of a FOIA Process Evaluation Working Group, which helped improve efficiency.
• Austin Schlick, General Counsel and Chief FOIA Officer at the FCC, highlighted the overhauled FCC website and greater online access to Commission information.
• Darren Ash, CIO and Chief FOIA Officer at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, described the NRC's efforts to deal with a surge of FOIA requests following the tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan last year.
• Robert Howarth, Deputy Director of Correspondence, Document Production and FOIA Management at the Department of Interior, detailed a reorganization of FOIA leadership at the DOI.

Attorney General Holder's full remarks can be read here.

Update: The National Security Archive has responded to Holder's speech. They strongly criticize the Attorney General for citing discredited statistics in his remarks. They also note that the DOJ has attempted to issue reductive regulations, waged a "war on leakers", and increasingly relied on several exemptions throughout Holder's tenure. The National Security Archive recently awarded the Department of Justice their Rosemary Award for worst open government performance by a federal agency in 2011.

Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post. 

Sunshine Week starts with a new report from the National Security Archive and the Knight Foundation that finds only 49 of 90 agencies have adopted 'concrete steps' to improve their responsiveness to Freedom of Information Act requests. This is incredibly disheartening, though an improvement on the numbers from last year's study that found 13 of 90 agencies following up. The agencies' failure to meet even the administration's low bar is unacceptable. The two 'concerte steps' are simply updating the language in FOIA training documents to presume openness and to assess whether resources for compliance are adequate.

The report stems from Obama's Executive Order that called for greater FOIA openness [link], one of the first official acts he made as President, a follow-up memo from Attorney General Eric Holder detailing the new principles on FOIA [pdf link] and another memo a year later from former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and former Counsel to the President Bob Bauer asking agencies to please take the baby steps previously promised [pdf link].

“At this rate, the president’s first term in office will be over by the time federal agencies do what he asked them to do on his first day in office,” commented Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which funded the study. “Freedom of information laws exist to help all of us get the information we need for this open society to function. Yet government at all levels seems to have a great deal of trouble obeying its own transparency laws.”

Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state “FOI Audits,” the Archive’s series of Knight Open Government Surveys started in 2002 and use open government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Knight Open Government Surveys led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests.

Among the varying responses from agencies, the most stunning result was the U.S. Postal Service saying it had "no responsive records" and never even received the Emanuel-Bauer memo! Below is a chart of the ratings of each agency:

Late last year, Sen. Ted Stevens was convicted on seven felony counts of making false statements on his personal financial disclosures. The octagenarian had received numerous gifts from an oil services company executive, including a full remodeling of his "chalet," a modest house in Girdwood, Alaska. Stevens wasn't helped in his trial by his cantakerous appearance on the stand and was not only convicted, but subsequently lost reelection, despite having nearly everything in Alaska named after him. Unless this is some cruel April Fool's joke, Stevens is in for some good news:

The Justice Department on Wednesday asked a federal judge to drop all charges against former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.

...

In a move first reported by NPR, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said he has decided to drop the case against Stevens rather than continue to defend the conviction in the face of persistent problems stemming from the actions of prosecutors.

"After careful review, I have concluded that certain information should have been provided to the defense for use at trial," Holder said in a statement Wednesday. "In light of this conclusion, and in consideration of the totality of the circumstances of this particular case, I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial."

...

With more ugly hearings expected, Holder is said to have decided late Tuesday to pull the plug. His decision is said to be based on Stevens' age — he's 85 — and the fact that Stevens is no longer in the Senate. Perhaps most importantly, Justice Department officials say Holder wants to send a message to prosecutors throughout the department that actions he regards as misconduct will not be tolerated.

I'll have to admit that while this is somewhat shocking, it isn't that much of a surprise. The prosecution was a disaster during the case and, if Stevens had not taken the stand and impugned his own integrity, I couldn't imagine a jury going along with such a terrible prosecution. Apparently this has been a serious problem at Justice over the past few years and this is Attorney General Holder putting his foot down.

Obviously, open and easy access to government information is not only essential to democracy here in the United States, it’s vital throughout the world as well. Global Integrity, who came out with their annual Global Integrity Report last month (which I blogged about then) has followed up with a more focused look at the degree of freedom of information in each country.

Every year, Global Integrity’s research teams assess whether citizens of each country have a right to government information. Regionally, the Middle East and North Africa score the worst when it comes to freedom of government information. Not all is totally bleak in those regions. Jordan is notable for making significant reforms. Unsurprisingly, those scoring the highest in access to government information are most European countries and Japan.

Most Eastern European nations are dramatically improving their scores, which Global Integrity attributes at least partly to their drive for membership in the European Union. Also at play, in a quite inspiring fashion, is how the region’s history of totalitarian domination, filled with decades of intimidation, paranoia and disappearance, has made government transparency appealing. Most of the region’s governments have opened up Soviet-era surveillance files, further fueling the desire to reject the secrecy of the police state and embrace open and democratic government.

Unfortunately, the United States does not make the “best of” list, nor does Canada. Long delays in government replies to information requests are the culprit. We’ve got much work to do. Hopefully, Attorney General Eric Holder’s memo instituting “a presumption of openness" in regard to federal agencies' responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, which he issued last week, is a big step in the right direction.

Check out Global Integrity’s report.

According to Secrecy News, the incoming Attorney General, who will be confirmed later today, has stated his position that Office of Legal Counsel memos should be made publicly available to "the maximum extent consistent with sound practice and competing concerns."

“I firmly believe that transparency is a key to good government.  Openness allows the public to have faith that its government obeys the law,” Mr. Holder told Sen. Feingold.

More particularly, he said he favored maximum public disclosure of Office of Legal Counsel opinions.

“Once the new Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel is confirmed, I plan to instruct that official to review the OLC’s policies relating to publication of its opinions with the [objective] of making its opinions available to the maximum extent consistent with sound practice and competing concerns,” Mr. Holder wrote.

The Office of Legal Counsel provides authoritative legal advice to the Attorney General that often sets the legal policy of the administration. During the Bush administration, OLC memos were not available to the public and were often used to provide legal justification to many controversial programs and policies, including war time powers, the use of torture, secret prisons, warantless wiretapping, and extraordinary rendition.

As the Secrecy News article notes, ProPublica is providing a database of Bush era OLC memos on controversial topics.