Obama admin. FOIA rejections increased 114% since the end of the Bush Admin.

Despite President Obama’s 2009 executive order requiring agencies to err on the side of disclosure when processing Freedom of Information Act requests, the Drug Enforcement Agency exempted a record number of FOIA requests in 2011 in nearly every category.

But it didn’t set records just in 2011: According to a comparison of publicly available data from FOIA.gov, the DEA rejected more FOIA requests in 2009, 2010, and 2011 than it did during the last year of George W. Bush’s administration.

When every FOIA exemption is taken into account (exemptions are the legal exceptions that allow agencies to withhold information from requesters), the DEA cited 2,195 exemptions in 2011, a 114 percent increase over 2008, when it cited only 1,024 exemptions.

The number of FOIA exemptions the DEA cited in 2011 also revealed an increase when compared to preceding years of the Obama administration--an increase of 38 percent over 2010 (1,581 exemptions), and 5.7 percent over 2009 (2,075).

But the really incredible number concerns the DEA’s citation of FOIA exemption 7(e). According to the Justice Department, 7(e) “affords protection to all law enforcement information that ‘would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.’”

The use of 7(e), which allows the DEA to conceal its policies regarding the use of wiretaps, raids, confidential informants, straw buys, tracking devices, and other tactics, increased 620 percent between 2010 and 2011; and 912 percent between 2011 and 2008.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/06/29/obamas-secretive-drug-war-dea-foia-rejec