[Reports on cell-phone outages are classified to prevent the public from seeing where and when cell phone companies have outages.]
Tompkins said the blanket removal of the entire [cell-phone] outage report system from public view was symptomatic of a larger trend in the Bush administration.
"Every time we turn around something else is a national security issue," he said. Furthermore, if some larger pattern of cell phone outages could be gleaned from the reports, he said, companies might "fix it, not bury it."
"I can't think of one problem that has gone away because it's kept a secret," he said.
--Al Tompkins, a Freedom of Information Act expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank, quoted in MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles
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