The National Security Archive is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at George Washington University that collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA was enacted in 1974 after the Watergate scandal to allow ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable by requesting and scrutinizing public documents.

Fuchs, whose organization sent a draft memo on openness signed by 60 other consumer organizations to the Obama transition team last November along with a request for quick action, said she expects Obama to push e-mail and require agencies to post more information on their sites, including blogs.

According to Public Citizen, currently about half of the 176 government agencies accept FOIA requests via e-mail or an on-site form. However, many do not reply by e-mail, said Fuchs. Instead, they mail back hard copies even if electronic documents were requested, unnecessarily slowing down the process.

"The law requires that they provide records in the form that you want, but not all will do this," she said. "They have lots of excuses, mostly relating to security, but there is no reason why they can't comply now using current technology. For instance, the old reason the State Department won't provide electronic forms is they say redacted words can be lifted from a PDF."

When the Standard posted this story, only one of Obama's new transparency directives was up on the Whitehouse website. We found copies of the remaining documents elsewhere. The Presidential Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government instructs three senior officials, including an as-yet-unnamed chief technology officer, to produce within 120 days an Open Government Directive detailing specific actions to implement open principles.