On President Obama's first day in office, the White House's 44th Temporary Occupant pledged "a new era of openness in our country" by a) signing an executive order committing the administration to transparency and b) issuing two presidential memoranda to achieve those results. Among other things, declared the duly informed National Security Archive, Freedom of Information Act requests would demand "a presumption of disclosure for government records and a hostility to the use of secrecy laws to cover up embarrassing information." It looked swell on paper, especially after the Bush regime’s 9/11 info-lockdown. But we all know how that turned out.
In March, an Associated Press analysis produced a sharp rebuke to the transparency initiative, reporting not merely bureaucratic foot-dragging on FOIA processing but an alarming backslide for taxpayers who might be curious to see what our money's buying. “Five years after Obama directed agencies to less frequently invoke a ‘deliberative process’ exception to withhold materials describing decision-making behind the scenes,” stated the AP, “the government did it anyway, a record 81,752 times.” Furthermore, The National Security Archive announced that 50 of 101 federal agencies have failed to comply with a 2007 congressional mandate to update their FOIA policies, and that 55 of those agencies “have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a ‘presumption of disclosure.’” And then came a dispiriting assessment of 15 major federal agencies from the Center For Effective Government, which graded the likes of the Social Security Administration to the State Department on FOIA processing, communications policies, and user-friendly websites. Seven of the 15 flunked. Said the Center’s CEO: “The fact that no agency achieved a top grade across all three areas illustrates the difficulty agencies are having with implementation overall.”
There are, of course, myriad possible explanations. Maybe, given budget cutbacks, there aren’t enough personnel to manage the crush of volume anymore. Maybe Obama was just kidding. Or maybe the federal culture of classification and secrecy is so pervasive and hard-wired, executive and legislative directives just don’t matter anymore.
Either way, as a handful of UFO researchers have discovered, the censorship epidemic has recently thrown a tarp over America's raw radar records. The dominoes began toppling in 2009, when the Federal Aviation Administration started sequestering ERIT data. ERIT — a computer program called the En Route Intelligence Tool — logs everything that reflects pingbacks, including a lot of chaotic junk that air traffic controllers normally don’t need to see on their screens, e.g., birds, bug swarms, false echoes, even jet contrails. ATC operators' top priority is legitimate air traffic, mapped by the National Track Analysis Program. NTAP’s real-time system filters out all the extraneous clutter and concentrates on targets that are supposed to be there, namely, aircraft with signal beacons, or transponders.
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