John Ashcroft, the 79th United States Attorney General put in place many restrictions on the release of information.

Freedom of information advocates have a lengthy to-do list for President-elect Barack Obama and Congress.

A report (PDF) from a coalition of open records groups lists 69 recommendations for the new administration to increase government transparency.

While the Obama transition team has vowed to run a transparent administration, it has yet to provide details about what they will do immediately – sort of. As we reported earlier this week, the transition team’s Web site, Change.gov, once contained pages describing how it would use technology to provide more information to the public, but the transition team took down the pages to “retool” them.

Perhaps this new report will help with that.

Read the rest at ProPublica