The report covers the last seven years of scaling back public access to important health, safety, national security and environmental information. According to the report, the Bush administration has systematically reduced public access to essential information. Homeland security has played a major role in the restriction of information through the reclassification of thousands of previously publicly available documents, use of the state secrets privilege to prevent the courts from accessing supposedly sensitive national security information, and creating over one hundred new sensitive but unclassified information categories. Other changes seem to address basic government efficiency and accountability, including increased use of executive privilege to prevent effective oversight, slowing down and scaling back public access under the Freedom of Information Act and limiting the rights of whistleblowers.
The report, written by David Banisar, lays the necessary groundwork for understanding the importance of an open and transparent government, for realizing the shortcomings of the current state of information and access, and for working toward the policies of the 21st century right-to-know era.
In the preface of the report, Bob Barr and John Podesta write that the report "provides ammunition to reclaim the open and balanced system of government set forth in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. It is now up to all of us to make our voices heard."