The 2008 Secrecy Report Card, from OpenTheGovernment.org has been released, and the results are not pretty.

This is the fifth annual report assessing trends in public access to information. This year's report is expanded to cover Mandatory Declassification Review numbers and progress under the Automatic Declassification Review process, and covers legislation in the 110th Congress that would increase openness and accountability. The report also contains updated numbers on requests for National Security Letters, competitiveness of federal contracting, and use of the "state secrets" privilege.

The not-so-surprising findings: "government secrecy is on the rise by almost every measure," as the AP reports today. The report cites 14 different measurements to quantify government secrecy, "including patents hidden from the public, secret court approvals for surveillance in sensitive terrorism and espionage investigations and the expanding use of informal labels to keep documents from being disclosed."

The report notes that the United States is now classifying more records as top secret or confidential, and employing fewer workers who make federal documents publicly available, than ever before. There was also an 80 percent decline over the last decade in the number of pages of records declassified, dropping last year to 37 million pages. The report also notes that federal surveillance activity under the secretive FISA court has risen for the ninth consecutive year, more than double the amount in 2000.

For more information, follow the links at right to the OpenTheGovernment.org site.