Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president.<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, was cautiously optimistic about Obama\u2019s move, saying that while it depended on the implementation, \u201cthere are some real innovations here\u201d that represent \u201ca major step forward\u201d towards rolling back government secrecy… [emphasis original<\/em>]<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Inserted from <Think Progress<\/a>><\/p>\n Like Aftergood, I think this order has te potential to be a real step forward. If it works in practice as well at it appears, this is clearly a move in the right direction. Time will tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Barack Obama took a significant step yesterday toward lifting the veil of secrecy imposed by Crawford Caligula and his GOP minions. Yesterday, President Obama issued an executive order on classified national security information that declared that \u201cNo information may remain classified indefinitely.\u201d The order is \u201cpart of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch\u2019s […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"top-secret\"](\"http:\/\/s217.photobucket.com\/albums\/cc83\/TomCat1948or2\/Blog%202009\/ObamaSignalsProgressonOpenness_20E8\/topsecret.gif\" "\\"top-secret\\"")
<\/a> Yesterday, President Obama issued<\/font> an executive order<\/a> on classified national security information that declared that \u201cNo information may remain classified indefinitely.\u201d The order is \u201cpart of<\/font> a sweeping overhaul<\/a> of the executive branch\u2019s system for protecting classified national security information,\u201d which includes overturning a rule put in place by Obama\u2019s predecessor, President George W. Bush, that made it easier for documents to remain classified:<\/font><\/p>\n