Politico broke the story of a January 18, 2011, meeting between House and Senate GOP aides and energy industry lobbyists to map out strategy for handcuffing President Obama and EPA on climate regulations.
Despite consternation about Wikileaks' massive dump of State Department memos, most leaks are still legal — and the New York Times apparently thinks such unauthorized disclosures from whistleblowers inside the government may be essential to journalism and democracy.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has started publishing the industry wish-lists on its own — including in some cases full texts of industry letters back to Issa.
The Associated Press reports the House Oversight Committee has asked the Department of Homeland Security for documents about its policy requiring political appointees to review Freedom of Information Act requests.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says the Dec. 21 memo implies that existing EPA openness policy meets White House criteria. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget may again be tampering with agency science for political purposes — accused by Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva (pictured) of censoring FOIA'd documents relating to the mid-summer estimate of Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Many publications and groups schedule special stories, reports, panels, or events during this week to promote freedom of information and to exercise their First Amendment rights. Find suggestions at the American Society of News Editors' official Sunshine Week website.
Now that you have long since published your story about the disappearance of BP's oil from the Gulf, you may want to check the math that story was based on using newly released technical information.
Is it a security risk for the American public to find out the risks presented by climate change? A recent story on the Central Intelligence Agency's Center on Climate Change and National Security by the Medill National Security Reporting Project was noteworthy in that all of its sources were unnamed.
A man claiming to be an ex-CIA agent is telling people they may stand to get rich if only they could come up with some dirt on scientist Michael Mann, author of the famous hockey-stick graph that shows the earth getting warm suddenly in recent years. No luck so far.
The media blog Gawker thinks it has uncovered a campaign to discredit the New Yorker writer after her August 2010 story on billionaires Charles and David H. Koch, who have secretly funded attacks on government regulations and bankrolled efforts to discredit settled climate science.
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