Authored by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., the report portrays an administration gripped by strict policies about information flow and paranoid about leaks across all executive branch departments.
"This is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered," David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times, told Downie, who now teaches journalism at Arizona State University.
The administration has implemented an "Insider Threat Program" in all government departments to urge federal employees to monitor their colleagues for possible unauthorized information disclosures. Administration employees suspected of leaking classified information are given lie-detector tests and subject to reviews of their telephone and e-mail records, wrote Downie, who was assisted in reporting by Sara Rafsky.
The report is the latest in a series of portrayals by journalists and media critics of a president whose rigid public relations practices belie his earlier promises of change and open access to public information.
Such accusations had been mounting prior to the series of stories about widespread surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail in the U.S. by the National Security Agency, made possible by internal documents that were leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden.
Since 2009, six government employees have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions in the leak of classified information to the press, vs. a total of three in all previous U.S. administrations, the report noted.
