The Government has long been snooping too much and telling too little. Lately, however, Americans have been using new legal weapons to fight against excessive federal secrecy, and have been winning some battles.
The chief target: the bulging files in which U.S. agencies keep billions of classified documents, ranging from sensitive details about the nation's nuclear arsenal to dossiers on citizens who have been put under surveillance because they attended radical (or not so radical) political meetings. Late last year Congress moved to open up more of those files. It liberally amended...