Here's an online guide to getting what the government's got:

• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has an easy-to-use FOI letter generator, for general requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
• For an individual's files, people should make requests under the Privacy Act. Here are relevant forms from the Freedom of Information Center at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism.
• Although access varies, every state now has open meetings or open records laws. The Reporters Committee has a handy guide on this, too.

Often the records can be obtained by simply asking for them, but since 9/11, federal agencies have grown increasingly stubborn about what they release. A just-released survey by the National Security Archive found that only 1 in 5 federal agencies meets congressionally mandated requirements for online information access. There's hope, though: A new bill is making its way through the House of Representatives, with bipartisan backing, that would strengthen the FOIA, one of a host of open government measures being looked at by the new Congress.

Last year, I interviewed secrecy watchdog Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who warned that the FOIA and open government are under attack. I checked back with Aftergood this week and found him of two minds these days.

"We've continued to pay a high price for secrecy in bad government decision making–on Iraq, on detention policy, on interrogation, on energy, and more," he says. "I think a lot of long-term damage has been done–in foreign policy, in fiscal policy–and we're going to be paying for many years for the choices we've made or the choices that have been made for us."

At the same time, Aftergood sees signs of hope.

"The 2006 election seems to have signaled an end of public tolerance for secret government and a return to more probing oversight and disclosure," he adds. "We've forgotten that this used to be the norm."

The price is indeed steep, both within and outside the government. Intelligence agencies, for one glaring example, still can't talk to each other and are scared to death of opening themselves up to the public. This is a recipe for more 9/11 and Iraq intel failures. How bad is it? I recall sitting next to an intelligence veteran last year who confided he'd seen my published stories distributed in the intelligence community–marked Secret. As Aftergood told me, "We're crippling ourselves with indiscriminate secrecy. It just makes no sense."