So Much for Obama’s Promise of Government Transparency

Although Obama’s promise of making a more transparent government were broken long ago it still entertains me to bring it up from time to time less people forget. Remember the legal documents produced by John Yoo that basically justified the president’s power to spy on American citizens without any need for a warrant or knowledge of the person being spied on? You probably don’t because those documents were classified and Obama isn’t showing any sign of declassifying them:

The Obama administration has refused to declassify a secret memo from the George W. Bush presidency that justified the warrantless spying conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Matthew Aid, a writer who’s covered the NSA and surveillance policy, requested a copy of a 2001 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion by John Yoo that discussed the legal grounds for electronic spying without permission from a special federal court. The Department of Justice mostly denied Aid’s Freedom of Information Act request, saying the redacted information in the OLC opinion was “classified, covered by non-disclosure provisions contained in other federal statutes, and is protected by the deliberative process privilege.”

The government is so transparent now that you could make privacy glass out of it. The privacy feature is for the government though, not you though.