The third factor is the natural predisposition of bureaucracies, both governmental and private, to exploit secrecy to whatever degree they are licensed to do so, and in this administration they're given virtually carte blanche.

It will be important to restore those provisions, those disclose provisions, those release provisions so that presidents are indeed held accountable and their information and papers are made public.

Secrecy doesn't attach to particular parties; it attaches to power. All of the bull work is in place for whomever succeeds. That's my concern.

If all these guys think that nothing is going to come out for 100 years, they're going to act a whole lot more boldly. So we need to get back into the declassification business. This notion of overclassification is not just a bleeding-heart liberal issue. When everything is classified, nothing is classified.

The SBUs have spread like kudzu and are choking off everyone's ability to see what the hell's going on in government.

I love the idea of a shield law; I don't know of any journalist who doesn't love the idea of a shield law. It's all in the details. Some of the shield laws that were floating around sounded good, but when you looked at them, exceptions or exclusions or broadness in the language really invited some problems.

A one year study by the Washington Post has documented 620 cases in which experimental drugs have been implicated in the deaths of cancer patients....And they amount to merely a fraction of the thousands of people who in recent years have died or suffered terribly from cancer experiments.