Is Scrooge plotting against Santa? Government says it's a secret

A CIA report on terrorist threats described a "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge" that planned to "sabotage the annual courier flight of the Government of the North Pole" imperiling "Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."

A government-watchdog group obtained the memo from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library through a Freedom of Information Act request. When it asked the CIA for the same report, it received a document entirely blacked out to protect national security.

It's an example of increasing and unjustified government secrecy, said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which last year helped expose a federal program to make secret millions of records once available to the public.

"We're back to a real rising tide of secrecy," Blanton said. And that tide has been accelerated by the Bush administration's war on terrorism, said several experts who met in Seattle this weekend for the annual Freedom of Information Summit, a conference attended by more than 100 open-government advocates who discussed topics ranging from John Lennon to myths about identity theft.

More federal records have been stamped secret in the last three years than during the peak years of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, Blanton noted.

Estimates of "over-classification" — the term for making documents secret that should be public — range from 50 percent, according to congressional testimony by a high-ranking Pentagon official, to 75 percent, cited by Thomas Kean, former New Jersey governor and chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

Some of the so-called secrets seem inexplicable: A government profile of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet released in 1999 noted that Pinochet "drinks scotch and pisco sours." A government version released in 2004 deleted those details as matters of national security.

A major problem, experts said during a panel discussion, are bureaucrats who see little reward and a lot of professional peril in releasing information.

"We realize the system needs to change," said William J. Bosanko, the associate director of the federal Information Security Oversight Office.

Another federal official, Gary Stern, general counsel of the National Archives, said the government sometimes reclassifies records for good reasons. Stern cited a federal database that listed Social Security numbers for grant recipients. Those computer records were taken down until Social Security numbers were deleted.

The Bush administration has a mixed record on secrecy, experts said.

Blanton said Bush deserves credit for keeping in place a Clinton administration executive order that calls for making secret federal records public after 25 years. But he said the Bush administration made changes to the order that led to releasing fewer documents.

Freedom-of-information requests aren't just crucial to watchdogs and journalists. John Scheinfeld said his 2006 documentary film "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" was based on a 20-year battle to obtain FBI records about the former Beatle-turned-Vietnam-War-protester.

Scheinfeld said his film offers "great parallels" to current debates about government secrecy: "At the heart of it is an unpopular war and a president who lied to the country. And if you protest, the government calls you unpatriotic and tries to silence you. Doesn't that sound familiar?"

The conference also touched on local issues, such as recent state legislation pushed by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels that would have exempted birth dates of public employees from being public records. Such information could be used in identity theft, Nickels said.

News organizations argued against the proposal, which died in the Legislature earlier this year, because they often use birth dates to check if public agencies employ felons who have access to vulnerable citizens.

Washington state's primary felon database operates on date of birth, state Attorney General Rob McKenna explained, and journalists use "birth dates to distinguish one Rob McKenna from another."

McKenna opposed the bill because he said there's no evidence identity theft can be traced to public records such as birth dates.

He said Social Security numbers, mother's maiden name and bank-account information are the main sources of identity theft and fraud, and those are not public records in Washington state.

"Looking at the data," McKenna said, "the idea of identity theft through public records is simply not supported by the facts."

Bob Young: 206-464-2174 or byoung@seattletimes.com