[Mudasir]

Federal agencies under the Bush administration are sweeping vast amounts of public information behind a curtain of secrecy in what they call the �fight against terrorism�, using 50 to 60 loosely defined security designations that can be imposed by officials as low-ranking as government clerks.

No one is tracking the amount of unclassified information that is no longer accessible.

For years, a citizen who wanted to know the name and phone number of a Pentagon official could buy a copy of the Defense Department directory at a government printing office. But since 2001, the directory has been stamped ''For Official Use Only," meaning the public may not have access to such basic information about the vast military bureaucracy.

In this cases and others, the information that the Bush administration is removing from public access is not risky enough to national security to be officially classified as ''Confidential," ''Secret," or ''Top Secret," under rules in place for decades.

But what is happening is that American public is losing access to large amounts of less-risky information through terms such as ''For Official Use Only," ''Sensitive But Unclassified," ''Not for Public Dissemination," and what Congress has estimated as 50 to 60 other designations developed by federal agencies to keep the public from seeing unclassified information.

Although some of these secrecy terms predate the Bush administration, advocates of open government say their use has grown sharply over the past four years. Precise numbers of documents being shielded are unknown because the administration keeps no records and what standards there are, they�re vague ones that govern the types of documents that can be made secret.

Under the official system for classified secrets, for example, each level of secrecy comes with clearly defined criteria. There are strict limitations on who is authorized to decide whether a piece of information should be classified. Precisely 4,007 officials have this power. Furthermore, there are time limits after which most classified secrets can become public.

The vague criteria of what is considered �classified� varies from one agency to another. In some departments, any employee, even a clerk, may stamp a document as off-limits. All 180,000 employees of the Homeland Security Department may decide a document is ''For Official Use Only."

There is no system for tracking who stamped it, for what reason, and how long it should stay secret. There is no process for appealing a secrecy decision.

''Information is getting withheld arbitrarily and unnecessarily," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. ''That is bad because it impedes oversight and obstructs accountability. It is the nature of bureaucracies to hoard information, and these new unclassified control mechanisms allow them to do that without restraint."

But critics contend that the system is far from balanced because the standards for sensitive but unclassified information are so loose. In some cases, the administration appears to have shielded information that posed no realistic security risk, but did threaten its political interests. Other times, bureaucrats appear to have acted overzealously, blocking useful information to no end.

In one recent case, Human Rights Watch earlier this month found an unclassified draft of a new policy on a Defense Department website. The document proposed holding suspected Iraqi insurgents without trial in the same way that accused Taliban members have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

After Human Rights Watch denounced the idea, the Pentagon took down its entire electronic library of unclassified documents, including many hundreds of unrelated papers. The military later put part of the website back up, but dozens of unrelated documents that were previously available to the public are still gone.

Such secrecy moves have been criticized across the political spectrum. A recent report coauthored by the Heritage Foundation think tank attacked ''overzealous" decisions to dismantle entire websites over security fears.

It also said that the Bush administration has not conducted a systematic review of formerly public information that has been made secret, by weighing the likelihood that it could help terrorists against the ''countervailing public safety and other benefits of providing" the information.

The move toward withholding unclassified information from the public occurs as the administration's use of the classified secrets system is soaring. It classified 16 million documents in 2004, the highest number recorded since the government began keeping track of them in 1980. That number is up from 14 million in 2003, 11 million in 2002, and 8 million in 2001.

And the number of old documents being declassified dropped from an average of 150 million a year during Bill Clinton's second term to an average of 54 million in Bush's first term. Last year, there were only 25 million declassifications.

With a few exceptions, the terms such as ''For Official Use Only" lack the force of law, so if a member of the public finds out that the document exists, he or she may still try to obtain it under the Freedom of Information Act. However, the Bush administration is also fighting to avoid releasing information under the act.

Under a Clinton administration policy, FOIA officers were supposed to operate with a ''presumption of disclosure" unless it was ''reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful."

But in October 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed course, instructing agencies to withhold information unless there was no ''sound legal basis" for doing so.

According to Peter Weitzel of the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, ''If you can control the flow of information, you often can control the process itself..."

Source: Boston.com