The Age of Missing Information

Since President Bush entered office, there has been a 75% increase in the amount of government information classified as secret each year. "Yet an even more aggressive form of government 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," writes Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as 'sensitive but unclassified' or 'for official use only.'" Examples of unclassified but unavailable information include the Defense Department's telephone directory, the National Archives' historical records, satellite orbital information, aeronautical maps, and environmental data.