Yes. I read a few of the accounts congratulating Bush on signing the "Open Government Act of 2007", which supposedly restored the parts of the FOIA act that John Ashcroft trashed. I suspected when I read the news blurbs that whatever open government the act was trying to restore, it sure wasn't going to touch all the secret-secret stuff that Bush does. And indeed it doesn't. And it also didn't fix what John Ashcroft wrought. From Secrecy News.

The new law makes several constructive procedural changes in the FOIA to encourage faster agency response times, to enable requesters to track the status of their requests, to expand the basis for fee waivers, and more.

One thing it does not do, however, is alter the criteria for secrecy and disclosure. Whatever records that a government agency was legally entitled to withhold before enactment of the "OPEN Government Act" can still be withheld now that the President has signed it....

Further, the widely-published AP account continued, "The legislation is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft after the 9/11 attacks in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security."

But that is incorrect.

Although the original House version of the OPEN Government Act did include a provision that would have repealed the Ashcroft policy and established a "presumption of openness," that provision was removed from the bill prior to passage.

Thus, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) noted with regret on the House floor on December 18 that the final legislation "does not include a provision which I thought was a key one establishing a presumption that government records should be released to the public unless there is a good reason to keep them secret."