The federal Freedom of Information Act is 31 years old this year. When Lyndon Johnson reluctantly put his signature on the bill on July 4, 1966, he ratified the intent of Congress to create a presumption that the records of all federal executive branch agencies would be public. Any secrecy would have to be justified by the government. Since that time, the federal FOIA has undergone a few legislative amendments, but has been shaped primarily by enforcement policies of the various presidential administrations, and, to a lesser extent, by court rulings.

There have been a handful of significant Supreme Court opinions construing the FOIA — most of them, unfortunately, limiting the act's scope. For example, the 1989 ruling in Department of Justice vs. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press produced two unfortunate pronouncements.

First, the court said that the core purpose of the Freedom of Information Act is to permit the public to discover what the government is up to, rather than what information it has amassed.

Second, the court ruled that there is a stronger "personal privacy" interest in information that is stored electronically in a centralized computer database than if it is only retrievable from paper records maintained in scattered sources.

On a day-to-day basis, it is the policies promulgated by the agencies and enforced by the Justice Department that make the difference between access and denial. For example, both aspects of the Reporters Committee case have been used by agencies — with the support of Justice under the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations — to deny access to lists of names, as well as to other information that ostensibly fails to shed light on the business of government, or that might be used by commercial requesters for solicitation purposes.

Many of the criticisms leveled at the Clinton administration on failures on FOIA policy are justified. The FBI still has a terrible record on disclosure, with a backlog of more than 15,000 unanswered requests and a minimum wait of two years or more before a substantive response can be expected.

And one of the first acts of the Clinton administration was to fight efforts to open up the National Health Care Task Force and its working groups to public scrutiny.

On the other hand, Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno inherited a legacy of entrenched bureaucratic resistance to openness promulgated during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Their October 1993 memoranda to agencies make clear that a new presumption of disclosure was to be the order of the day.

President Clinton's 1995 executive order on national security classification created a similar presumption of openness, with declassification for most records mandatory in 25 years of less. And even Energy Chief Hazel O'Leary, who misguidedly commissioned "favorability" rating on journalists from a consulting firm called Carma International, did establish a refreshing policy of disclosure at a department notoriously shrouded in secrecy — even if it took the ground-breaking series on plutonium experiments by The Albuquerque (N.M.) Tribune to trigger it.

The Clinton administration has enthusiastically embraced computerized access to government information. But his administration continues to give excessive deference to the personal privacy exemptions to FOIA.

The FOIA battle of the next century will be waged over the tension between a policy of government disclosure and of protection of personal privacy. Since the end of the Cold War, the national security exemption has become less and less compelling. But personal privacy remains the No. 1 visceral issue for the general public.

Witness the controversy over access in computerized medical records, or the enactment of the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, with its unfunded mandate compelling the states to seal off "personal" information in their automobile records, regardless of the access requirements of various state open records laws.

With threats of crime and terrorism encouraging Congress to enact more and more intrusive legislation permitting greater intrusions into the private lives of citizens, it is more critical than ever that Journalists remind the public that the only assurance that the rights of individuals are protected is when the records remain open to scrutiny.

This is our challenge.

Jane Kirtley is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.