Very true. But informing oneself fully about the issue in question is even more fundamental - to wit:

Having an active interest in both community gardening and organic farming, I spent a modest amount of time reading the text of these and other bills related to the recent food-safety debacles (like HR 814 - ref http://thomas.loc.gov/), and reading analyses from respected pro-consumer food safety advocates (eg http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/foodsafety/background-on-h-r-875). It quickly became clear that there's been a bit of a rush to judgement by some people about just what's in these bills.

I understand that the last few years (heck, the last several decades) may have made many of us prone to hair trigger paranoia wrt govt/corporate quid-pro-quos. But breathless panic doesn't serve our personal or public interests any better than ignornace or willful denial.

To bring this back to the original topic, I'm glad KEI is pursuing this information and I hope that people will press the administration on it, but it does look as though this initial denial of FOIA can be laid at the feet of a longtime civil servant's overenthusiam for the rubber stamp, and not current Executive policy. I believe that the truly important part of this story will be to see how the Obama administration reacts when made explicitly aware of the issue.

Yeah AC, that was my (old techie) reaction as well. Along with - "What an irresponsible asshat, to drop a CRT into a regular trash bin". Around here (and I think in most of the US nowadays), that's a huge non-no - CRTs contain wicked amounts of heavy metals that are verboten in regular landfills, and the implosion risk aka a face full of glass shards to a trash collector (the professional, paid-to-do-it kind) is non-zero enough to warrant the proscription.

If you'd tried to pull that stunt at the MIT Electronics flea mkt (third Sunday every month april-oct Albany st garage - best of its kind in North America), you'd been thrown out on your ass - for good.