The new directive, from Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget, requires executive departments and agencies, within specific deadlines of not more than two months, to publish more information about their work online in an open format that can be retrieved and searched easily.

The progress report recounts what the administration has done so far to improve transparency, including writing new ethics rules to (mostly) prevent lobbyists from coming to work in government or sitting on its advisory boards; publishing the names of White House visitors; creating Websites that track how the government spends taxpayer money; reversing a Bush administration executive order that limited access to presidential records; and adopted a new state secrets policy. (The report neglects to mention ongoing criticism about the effectiveness of some of these measures.)

The latest transparency directive, while welcomed by open-government advocates, also highlights the fact that the sort of opennness Obama called for on his first day in office still has not taken place inside many executive agencies.

As Meredith Fuchs, General Counsel of the National Security Archive put it in a statement released after the White House announcement:

The Administration appears to realize that even eloquent statements of principle will not shift the bureaucracy’s natural and political tendency towards secrecy.

As for OMB’s new timetables to require more openness, she said:

The only thing missing is a clear enforcement regime, but if the White House, OMB, and the heads of the agencies are serious, then they will use their authority to make these changes real. In some ways that is the test of how serious the Obama Administration is about transparency.

Update: Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News notes that the new directive “does not extend to classified national security information or controlled unclassified information, both of which are to be addressed in other pending executive orders. But it does direct agencies to reduce any backlogs in Freedom of Information Act requests “by ten percent each year.”

The provision was proposed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Ct.), as Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News explains, specifically “to thwart a successful FOIA lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union” which wants the government to turn over photos documenting abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody.  I wrote about the bill and its progress last week here. Although a federal appeals court ruled last year that the government must produce those unclassified photos under the Freedom of Information Act, the government has refused, and filed a petition to the Supreme Court for review.

The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided whether it will hear the case, though, and given that Congress may resolve the matter by hiding the unclassified photographs with this legislation, Solicitor General Elena Kagan last week asked the court to put off deciding, since it looks like Congress is prepared to decide the matter — and conceal the photographs — on its own.

“From an open government point of view, it is dismaying that Congress would intervene to alter the outcome of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act proceeding,” writes Aftergood in his blog, which has done a terrific job of exposing the government’s efforts to hide what’s supposed to be public information. Aftergood adds that the move reveals Congress doesn’t have much confidence in its own Freedom of Information Act, the federal courts interpreting it, or the principles behind it, if it feels the need to exempt this specific set of photos from the law’s purview.

On the other hand, he notes that it could be worse: the Supreme Court could have taken the case and upheld the Obama administration’s right to exempt the photos “simply because they may pose an unspecified danger to unspecified persons.” “Such a Supreme Court ruling would have left a gaping hole in the Freedom of Information Act even larger than what the Obama Administration and Congress have now created,” writes Aftergood.

Or, of course, the Supreme Court might have just done its job, and recognized, as the two lower courts who’ve heard this case did, that unclassified documents can’t be concealed based simply on the executive’s fear that exposing government wrongdoing will incite anger at the United States and endanger national security. After all, if preventing anger at the United States were a legitimate reason to conceal unclassified information about the government, then there would be considerably less Information left for the Act to protect.

Notwithstanding her much-decried “wise Latina woman” claim, it turns out Sotomayor is no liberal activist hell-bent on replacing the Constitution’s equal protection clause with a new section mandating affirmative action, as some of the Republican criticism would suggest.

Instead, CRS reports, via Secrecy News: “Perhaps the most consistent characteristic of Judge Sotomayor’s approach as an appellate judge has been an adherence to the doctrine of stare decisis, i.e., the upholding of past judicial precedents.”

According to the nonpartisan research service, Sotomayor’s other prominent characteristics include “a careful application of particular facts at issue in a case and a dislike for situations in which the court might be seen as oversteping its judicial role.”

Hardly a judge who plans “to use her seat on the Supreme Court to advance liberal policy preferences,” as former Attorney General Ed Meese, who’s helping direct her critics, has suggested.

The photos are supposed to be released on May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now been clearly prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al-Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country’s image, and endanger our men and women in uniform,” the senators wrote in a May 6 letter. “We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures.”

The ACLU, meanwhile, is keeping the up fight for the photos:

“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” ACLU attorney Amrit Singh told Secrecy News. “Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse.”

“Our Board was heartened by your early statements and actions on openness in Government,” wrote the board’s acting chairman, Martin Faga, to President Obama on March 6.  “Still, we have to sound a note of alarm about how well the Government is doing in this area. In fact, we have concluded that this fundamental principle of self-government is at risk and, without decisive action, the situation is likely to worsen.”

Members of the Public Interest Declassification Board are appointed by the White House and Congress, and Martin Faga is a a former director of the National Reconnaissance Office. In the letter, Faga identified a range of problems that warns are preventing declassification, including inadequate resources, coordination and leadership, and poor management of digital records.

“The rapid evolution and expansion of digital records in varying formats have severely affected the Government’s ability to identify and preserve important records and raised the real possibility that we will lose much of our history,” Faga wrote. “Future historians may find that the paper records of early American history provide a more reliable historical account than the inchoate mass of digital communications of the current era.”