Give the Obama administration credit. Officials have made some changes that provide more transparency, especially in the area of the Freedom of Information Act.

See, e.g., this new Justice Department FOIA page, which lists in one convenient location the Annual FOIA Reports for myriad other federal agencies. As a Justice Department press release put it Wednesday:

"As a result of the new format, members of the public, including public interest organizations, scholars, and the media, will be able to more easily track FOIA performance."

This is actually true. the Annual FOIA Reports include information such as "detailed statistics on the number and disposition of FOIA requests, including response times, volume of requests, and personnel costs."

There's eye-opening stuff. Randomly selected: the oldest unresolved administrative FOIA appeal at the Central Intelligence Agency dates back to March 1, 1993. The longest the State Department took to complete a complex FOIA request was 1,900 days. The Department of Veterans Affairs received an eye-opening 99,333 FOIA requests during the year.

Information-gathering time for the preceding paragraph: three minutes.