After eight years of oppressive government secrecy, the new Obama administration wasted no time making strides toward what the President called “a new era of openness.” In his first full day in office, Obama signed an executive order and two presidential memoranda aimed at releasing government information from the vice grip of the previous administration.

The steps are a “spectacular start” toward greater government transparency and accountability, according to Stephen Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and writer of the Secrecy News blog, but they are just the start. As President Obama readily acknowledged, many more transparency issues within the federal government need to be addressed.

One of Obama’s early actions was to release a memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act (pdf), making it harder for the government to “withhold” information. Though laudable, the memorandum doesn’t address the persistent over-classification that’s hampered a free flow of information. The National Security Agency can still classify a host of documents that should be available to the public.

“People from throughout the intelligence, military, and law enforcement communities would acknowledge that the excessive overclassification is a problem,” according to Meredith Fuchs of the George Washington University’s National Security Archive, “and it actually puts us at risk, so it has to be fixed.”

There are a number of high-profile Freedom of Information Act requests still outstanding—including the documents surrounding warrantless wiretapping, detainee treatment, and the millions of missing Bush Administration White House emails—that aren’t addressed in Obama’s preliminary actions either. Fuchs believes these cases present opportunities for the new administration to prove themselves as the advocates to open government with real actions.

So far, according to Fuchs, Obama’s actions have been more of a statement of principals, albeit an important one, rather than a panacea for government accountability. The actions signal a drastic change in the way the government interacts with the American people, but more details are needed, including how the transparency principals are going to be carried out.

“There’s fierce bureaucratic culture of protectiveness” that has taken hold inside the federal government, according to Aftergood. Without definitive rules, the support of congress, and pressure from the public, the cloud of government secrecy won’t go away. What Obama did achieve, Aftergood said, is that “he made it clear that openness is not a slogan, and it is not even an end of itself, rather it is a means to an end, and that ultimate end is a vital and vigorous democracy.”

Image of the National Archives building in Washington D.C.

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo has a video on another angle to Obama’s transparency efforts:

Barack Obama is on the cover of January’s Columbia Journalism Review—but this hardly distinguishes the magazine from the others on the rack. The distinguishing feature is that Barack Obama appears something just short of sinister as he smirks and stares at you through a side-glancing eye. It’s almost as if the magazine’s art department peered inside the mind of a conservative talk show host and painted the Obama they found there.

The editorial inside calls on Obama to “turn the lights back on in the White House” and presents a laundry lists of actions he could take to decisively reject and reverse the excessive secrecy of his predecessor. 

Here’s a taste: 

* "In his first budget, restore, as Congress intended, the Office of Government Information Services to the National Archives and Records Administration, and remove it from the Justice Department, where conflicts of interest on transparency abound."

* "Get a handle on 'pseudo-secrecy'—the wholesale marking of documents with secret-ish labels outside of the official classification system—by reducing its use, establishing a system for appeals of such labels, and forbidding their use in Freedom of Information Act decisions." 

* "Revise outsourcing contracts to ensure that records generated by private companies doing government business will be treated like any agency-generated document."

The magazine's pages are peppered with points on a “Sunshine Timeline” that begins with a set of laws on public court proceedings and records passed by Henry III in 1267 and stumbles through the centuries grabbing at events as it finds them:

1766: Sweden adopts the first freedom of information law.

1935: The creation of the Federal Register, “the first comprehensive accounting of U.S. executive-branch rules and regulations.”

1953: “The American Society of Newspapers commissions a survey of all the laws (local, state, and federal) that could be used to gain access to government records—and concludes that the situation is bleak.”

1966: The Freedom of Information Act passes. “Without the votes to sustain the veto, and with Bill Moyers, his press secretary, urging him on, LBJ signs the bill.”

Top-secret government documents outlining confidential information about al-Qaeda were accidentally left on a train in Great Britain, BBC News reports. A civil servant apparently left them there accidentally, before the papers were found by fellow passengers, who turned them over to the BBC, who turned them over to the police. “Such confidential documents should be locked away,” said Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select committee, “they should not be read on trains.” And they definitely shouldn’t be left there. 

It reminds me of the trailer for the upcoming film by the Cohen brothers, Burn After Reading: