BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. As we just heard, the White House press corps may be clamoring for information, but the White House is showing even less willingness to give it up. Recently the National Press Club wrote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a letter protesting broad new restrictions on what may be posted on the Defense Department Inspector General's website. The Defense Department Inspector General's website? Well, that may not mean much to us, but it means a heck of a lot to Pentagon reporters like John Donnelly who's chairman of the board of the National Press Club.

JOHN DONNELLY: The Inspector General is one of the few organizations that has the authority to look into Defense Department programs and produces publicly available documents about what it finds. I regularly write about, for example, contractors overcharging on spare parts and the like. One time I did a report on an Inspector General document indicating that Pentagon weapons systems overseas were causing garage doors to open and close and baby monitors to go off. So it's everything from the arcane to the, you know, more significant things about the major weapons systems sometimes costing more than they say they are going to, or, or not performing as well as advertised.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So the way I understand it, there wasn't any formal announcement made about the change and what kind of information would be available on the site. How did you learn about it?

JOHN DONNELLY: Well I was - just happened to be on the site, as I sometimes am, looking for something else, and I, I came across this December 5th memo from the Inspector General Joseph Schmitz laying out various categories of information that would not be put on the website. Now the Inspector General's people tell me that the intention was not to restrict the flow of information but actually to increase it and that these were merely guidelines telling people sort of how to go about increasing it. I don't know what their intentions are, but if you look at the language of the memo itself, it is worded so broadly that it could definitely be construed to be more restrictive with information than they typically are.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I did look at the language of the memo, and it said that among the restricted information would be information "not specifically approved for public release," information that would "pose an unacceptable risk to national security or threaten the safety and privacy of men and women in the armed forces," and most worrisome at least to me, information "of questionable value to the general public." Now who would determine that?

JOHN DONNELLY: Well, who would determine any of these is a good question. This report about the baby beepers going off in Germany because of our weapons systems -- who's to say that that is not going to be deemed by someone to pose a risk to national security? A lot of the information on the Inspector General's website is not of interest to the general public, but it is of value to the general public. In other words it takes reporters to actually present it to the public in a way that they understand. And then the other categories of information they would restrict such as information that might threaten the safety and privacy of the people in uniform or information that's not approved for public release, they seem to be redundant to me to the extent that we already have protections in place, and, and the risk of having this additional wording is that it's worded so broadly that you might go beyond what the current restrictions are on classified and other kinds of protected information.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you have any way of knowing if the change has been implemented?

JOHN DONNELLY:Oh, it's been implemented, because the memo says "effective immediately." If the question is do I know of information taken off the website as a result of the policy, the answer is no, but I--

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You wouldn't know that.

BOB GARFIELD:Exactly. Unless I had a source who would tell me that something's been removed or, or not put on to begin with, because of this new policy.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now the National Press Club, and you're the chairman of the NPC Board, wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld protecting the Inspector General's new policy. Have you gotten any reply?

JOHN DONNELLY: Nope. We have not. Not even a "thank you for your interest in national defense" reply, so we may have to follow up with him and see if he received the first one.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, John, thank you very much.

JOHN DONNELLY: My pleasure. Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: John Donnelly is a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and chairman of the board of the National Press Club.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Federal agencies are not alone in being unresponsive to secrecy concerns. That attitude has filtered down. Case in point, Florida, the Sunshine State, aptly named not just for its weather but for laws that guarantee Floridians open access to public records. Trouble is, those laws are often ignored, or so found the Sarasota Herald Tribune. The paper helped to organize a kind of sting operation and found that the state was mostly not in compliance with its own access laws. Reporter Matthew Doig was involved in the undercover audit. Matthew, welcome to On the Media.

MATTHEW DOIG: Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So first of all what prompted this project?

MATTHEW DOIG: For about the past year or so, my colleague, Chris Davis and I, have been doing a number of stories that required public records, and we kept coming across people who were, you know, putting up these roadblocks and not giving us things that were clearly a public record, and for a while now we've been saying you know, one of these days we should do an audit, and we finally got to the point where we were sick of the roadblocks and said okay, we're going to do it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you were testing the public records law.

MATTHEW DOIG: Right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What does that law say?

MATTHEW DOIG: It says basically that any person can get a public record, which is basically any record generated by government.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So reporters from your paper and other news outlets went throughout the state undercover, and what were their marching orders?

MATTHEW DOIG:To go out, be polite, but pose as basically regular citizens and see what happened when they asked for something that is clearly a public record.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And they were supposed to remain anonymous.

MATTHEW DOIG:Right. The law gives you anonymity, cause if you're asking for sensitive information, and you don't want any kind of reprisals or anything, you may not want to give your name, and the law says you don't have to.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So your volunteers visited some 234 different local agencies in almost all of the state's counties, and in the end, only 57 percent of the agencies were in compliance with the public records law.

MATTHEW DOIG: Right.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Give me some anecdotes about what your volunteers confronted.

MATTHEW DOIG: The notable case is the, the one at the Charlotte County School District. The volunteer went in and asked for the superintendent's cell phone bill, and while they were back looking for it, two sheriff's deputies showed up. It was clearly the fact that somebody was coming up and for the first time asking for the superintendent's cell phone bill, that kind of made everybody uneasy. The volunteer who went to Broward County, there was a county administrator, he asked for the week's worth of emails, and the guy made kind of thinly veiled threats -- said "I can make your life very difficult," required that person give a name; after he got the person's name, he found the phone number, called the volunteer up and left a message saying essentially, look I can find you, you know, I don't know what you're doing. And he also called where the volunteer worked and was trying to find out what that person was doing, looking into his background.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Does it surprise you that people would get suspicious when anonymous people come in asking for officials' cell phone records?

MATTHEW DOIG:Well, I mean I, I don't know is surprise is the right word. I, I think there was a instinct out there among these people that they were very nervous. You know, they wondered if they were being investigated or if a political opponent had pushed this along. The feeling out there was not - well, this person wants a document, and it's a public record, so I'm going to get it to him as fast as possible. It was - oh my goodness, how am I going to protect myself from whatever they want to get on me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Was September 11th ever used as a justification for denying the public records requests?

MATTHEW DOIG:Absolutely. There was this September 11th bogey-man out there that was cited often. You know, another, and I hate to pick on the school superintendents, but another person went to a school superintendent, asked for a bill and when we called him afterwards, I, you know, I asked him why he didn't give it up, and he said well, you know, the guy didn't give me his name, and for all I know he could have been a terrorist.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: A terrorist that wanted cell phone records?

MATTHEW DOIG:Exactly-- well, that's the question I posed to him. The thing he said was, you know, we've got children to protect, but you know he couldn't explain how a terrorist would use a cell phone bill to harm children.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You know, one of the stranger aspects of your audit was the fact that despite the dismal showing of the State of Florida, Florida actually has a pretty strong tradition of ensuring that access to public records is open.

MATTHEW DOIG: Right. Well, the law's been around since 1909, and it's one of the few states that have it written into the Constitution, and every time you turn on the news channels, you know, if there's a big kind of media bonanza in Florida, you'll always see the talking heads say you know, thanks to Florida's generous public records laws, we got this document so quick, and that was kind of the point of the story, is that if you're a reporter or an attorney, even if you have to jump through some hoops, you're going to get what you want eventually, cause the law is pretty clear. And that's why we set this up in a way where it was just a regular person without the power of the press or an attorney with them to test how they'd be treated.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Matthew Doig, thank you very much.

MATTHEW DOIG: Thanks for having me.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Matthew Doig is a reporter for the Sarasota Herald Tribune. [MUSIC]

copyright 2004 WNYC Radio