Do you feel safer in the dark?

It's a question that the public needs to ask in light of an expanding cloak of secrecy that shrouds more federal activities, committee meetings, patent applications and even special-interest legislation than at the height of the Cold War.

The government put a "Secret" stamp on 15.6 million new documents in 2004 - 81 percent more than in 2000, according to OpenGovernment.org, a group of newspaper organizations and consumer advocates dedicated to reversing the government secrecy trend.

Some added security might be justified in our battle against terrorism, but the sheer volume of secrets being created by the government runs counter to the recommendations of both the 9-11 Commission and the congressional joint inquiry into 9-11. Both groups suggested that reducing unnecessary secrets would enhance security by enabling sharing of the sort of vital information that could have helped to prevent 9-11.

Standing between an informed citizenry and a secrecy-prone government is the Freedom of Information Act, which celebrated its 40th birthday, appropriately, on the Fourth of July.

President Johnson, despite his own openly hostile relationship with the press, signed the FOIA into law in 1966, noting, "… The United States is an open society in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded."

Johnson also said something that hits at the crux of the government secrets controversy: "A democracy works best when the people have all the information that the security of the nation permits." (Emphasis added) No one should be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest."

The "national security" qualifier has served as a sometimes-flimsy support for secrets that are more self-serving than security-based. For instance, some polluters sought to use the Patriot Act to stamp a "critical infrastructure information" designation on their operations, a move that some senators vigorously contested.

Overuse of the "national security" stamp isn't exclusive to federal operations.

In 2004, the states enacted 62 laws to expand secrecy, compared to 38 laws opening up government. It wasn't generally about security. A law in Louisiana, for instance, banned using electronic scanners to copy public documents; the measure's sponsors just wanted to keep on charging for making copies.

Ironically, the public pays the cost of locking up public information, and that cost is going up. According to OpenGovernment.org's 2005 report on government secrecy, the 2004 cost of classifying documents was $7.2 billion - an 11 percent increase from 2003.

The Freedom of Information Act remains a valuable tool in keeping government open, but it's not a timely one, by any means. Although the law requires an answer to FOIA requests within 20 days, the 2003 National Security Archives report found "median response times may be as long as 905 working days at the Department of Agriculture and 1,113 working days at the Environmental Protection Agency." That means a delay that can stretch out over several years.

"Don't like it? Sue us" is the agencies' response, knowing that for most people, filing in court is a financial hardship that effectively stifles further action.

Media organizations use FOIA lawsuits to uncover information deemed to be in the public interest. But we'd rather that it wasn't necessary. If more government agencies took the position that the public's business is, in fact, public, then they'd find that releasing information generally was in their interest. This would help repair trust between the people and their government.