When you get new people in, you're going to have a breath of fresh air and there's going to be a window when people will decide what direction to go. It'll be determined by outside events, by the personalities that occupy those positions, and by the treatment they receive both from the press and the public, of the honeymoon period.

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.

One of the principal factors fueling the proliferation of the abuse of secrecy and sensitive but unclassifieds is the administration's adherence to the unitary executive principal. This administration more than any of its predecessors believes that it is its responsibility to collect power onto itself in the executive office when it comes to the conduct of war, foreign policy, the management of agencies and departments, regulations, etc.

Another factor is the post-9/11 security mentality, which views sunlight as toxic and imagines that somehow bin Laden is dependent upon our government documents, a "fact" that has never, ever been supported to my knowledge. So, that's the second factor.

The mechanics vary from place to place and from office to office. The handling of SBUs can be different in the same agency just across the hall, one from another. There are virtually no standards.

An attitudinal sea change. I think that's the hardest one to fix. Presidential directives, bills, provisions can all be rescinded, repealed, amended, but attitudes linger. The hardest thing is going to be to try to reverse an attitude, a bunker mentality that equates secrecy with either security or heightened efficiency and that regards transparency as an invitation to mischief and trespass. This default position of operating in the shadows is going to be somewhat appealing to whomever inherits office.

When you get new people in, you're going to have a breath of fresh air and there's going to be a window when people will decide what direction to go. It'll be determined by outside events, by the personalities that occupy those positions, and by the treatment they receive both from the press and the public, of the honeymoon period.