WASHINGTON-- When President Clinton announced three years ago that he was ordering automatic declassification of millions of the government's oldest secrets, he didn’t mention the blanket exemption for the FBI. FBI officials defended the previously undisclosed exemption, saying it was essential because of the mammoth size of its files, 6.5 million cubic feet, in which classified and unclassified records are mingled, often without any "Top Secret," "Secret" or "Confidential" labels to show which were supposed to deal with national security. Everything from the bureau's oldest foreign counterintelligence files to musty stolen car and bank robbery records is covered. (And, of course, the agencies' violations of the civil rights of American citizens, such as when it framed members of the Black Panther movement, or the American Indian Movement, will remain secret. WFI Editor)

No other government agency -- not the CIA or the super-secret National Security Agency -- won such a pass. In fact, officials said, these agencies are still waiting for Clinton to formally approve narrower exemptions for them. (After all, if the American people understood the scale of the crimes committed by the Intelligence Community, they might just be incensed. WFI Editor) Clinton's 1995 decree limited the classification of new documents and prescribed sanctions for violations of the order, but the automatic declassification of old records by 2000 was the centerpiece. The plan envisioned exemptions for the government's most sensitive records, such as the millions of pages detailing the CIA's covert actions, but these were to be granted after a complex process that calls for "a specific date or event" when the exemptions are to end.

The arrangement first came to light in court papers last month and was laid out in detail in a memo obtained last week under the Freedom of Information Act. Critics of government secrecy said in recent interviews that the exemption was legally questionable because it has no cutoff date and because the FBI used federal privacy law rather than any national security concerns to justify it. (Legalese can impose terrible hardships on people, under Acts of Congress with names like, "Relief of the People Act." President Clinton is no less an attorney than his namesake, Thomas Jefferson, who didn't mean that all people are equal when he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that "All men are created equal." This same circumstance occurred when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and not a single slave was set free. Why? Because it only had effect in the South, where the President's writ no longer had force. WFI Editor)

SOURCE: Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, 19 July, 1998.

Crime may be down in the US, but wiretaps are still on the rise. State and federal law-enforcement agencies sought permission to conduct 1,186 surveillance interceptions in 1997 -- a 3% jump from 1996 and a 176% increase since 1987. Every one of last year's requests was granted, although only 1,094 wiretaps actually were installed -- at an average cost of US$61,000 each. Seventy-three percent of all intercept authorizations were acquired in the course of narcotics investigations, making drug peddlers the primary targets of communications snoops, while gambling rings and racketeers tied for second at 8% each. It takes a lot of listening to put a few bad guys behind bars -- of the roughly 2.3 million conversations intercepted last year, 20 percent generated incriminating evidence, resulting in 3,086 arrests and 542 criminal convictions.

These articles are excerpted here in the public service of the national interest of the American people.