From Al Jazeera America: While much has been made of the government’s current penchant for secrecy, few have noticed that this atmosphere now shrouds government history as well.
Working on a biography of a noted Washington journalist, I placed a routine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2011 for her FBI file. The timing of my application seemed propitious. Two years earlier, President Barack Obama had signed an executive order to speed declassification of materials and had issued an encouraging FOIA memorandum.