Freedom of Information versus Domestic Security

This item from Reason Hit and Run is a quick one-liner:

What Gets Redacted

This defies satire.

If you follow the link, you'll find that Jesse Walker is, if anything, understating the case. It's a Memory Hole page:

Anybody who has read many official documents — including those making headlines in the last year or more — has seen plenty of redactions (those portions that are blacked out or otherwise made unreadable). This, we're told, is for legitimate reasons, such as "national security" or "protecting intelligence sources and methods." But now we have absolute, incontrovertible proof that the government also censors completely innocuous material simply because they don't like it.

And they're not kidding. The posted example is an extract from a redacted document and then the same extract with the redaction omitted. There is no possible way to justify the original redaction. It neither compromises domestic security nor protects an informant or confidential source. It merely rubs the wrong way against the prejudices of the individual or agency performing the redaction.

The existance of even one such bogus redaction calls into question every document the government has so treated. What else is being redacted for trivial or partisan reasons (as if those are not the same thing in many cases)? How much potentially damaging information is being deliberately withheld without just cause? We can't possibly know.

I'm forced to admit that there are cases where entire documents or parts of them must be withheld: most countries have Official Secrets Act or equivalent legislation to cover these cases. It's legitimate to protect your secrets, but secrecy is a multi-bladed weapon and it can damage you as easily as your real or imagined opponents. In a free society, the government must be held to the highest standards of openness: this example shows that the current American government is failing badly in this regard.

But, in the middle of a protracted campaign against terror, the initiative rests with that same government. How can you persuade them to live up to the expectations of clarity and fairness when they can always fall back on the argument that "national security" trumps all? Even when that power is being used for exactly the sort of trivial, partisan bullshit shown in the Memory Hole example?