The Obama administration took office promising greater transparency in its dealings with the press, but those promises have gone largely unfulfilled, according to a report that says White House efforts to prosecute leakers and control the flow of information have had a chilling effect on the news media.

Among other things, the report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, an advocacy group, found that:

• Government officials suspected of discussing classified information with reporters are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their phone and e-mail records. The result? Officials are increasingly wary of talking to journalists.

• In an echo of Orwell's "1984," an "Insider Threat Program" requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.

• "Six government employees and two contractors - including Edward Snowden - have been the subject of criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press. That compares to three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations. Reporters' phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations."

• The Snowden revelations detailing extensive surveillance of telephone and e-mail traffic by the National Security Agency have left many officials reluctant to discuss even unclassified information, fearing that "leak investigations and government surveillance make it more difficult for reporters to protect them as sources."

As David E. Sanger, chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times put it, "This is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered."

The CPJ usually advocates for greater press freedoms abroad, but in light of the Obama administration's policies the group felt compelled to examine the state of news media freedom in the U.S. The report was written by Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post.

New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane told Downie that officials are "scared to death" by the prosecutions.

"There's a gray zone between classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that gray zone. Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone," Shane added. "It's having a deterrent effect. If we consider aggressive press coverage of government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips the balance heavily in favor of the government."

Meanwhile, even designated administration spokesmen "are often unresponsive or hostile to press inquiries, even when reporters have been sent to them by officials who won't talk on their own," the report noted.

"Despite President Barack Obama's repeated promise that his administration would be the most open and transparent in American history, reporters and government transparency advocates said they are disappointed by its performance in improving access to the information they need," Downie wrote.

Downie said simmering tensions between journalists and the White House boiled over in May, when it was revealed that the Justice Department had seized phone records from The Associated Press. The seizure was prompted by an AP story about a CIA operation to thwart an Al-Qaeda plot to blow up an airplane bound for the U.S..

White House officials pointed out that Obama gave more interviews in his first four-plus years in office than Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did in their first terms combined. The administration also put more government data online, quickened the processing of Freedom of Information Act requests, and limited the amount of government data classified as secret.

"The idea that people are shutting up and not leaking to reporters is belied by the facts," White House press secretary Jay Carney told Downie.

Deputy White House national security adviser Ben Rhodes told Downie the administration is caught between demands for openness and the need to protect national security in a post-9/11 age.

Rhodes cited the example of the administration's declassification of information about drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia, after news reports about such attacks.

"If you can be transparent, you can defend the policy," Rhodes said. "But then you're accused of jeopardizing national security. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. There is so much political controversy over everything in Washington. It can be a disincentive."

Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, a senior national security lawyer in the Pentagon and the Justice Department during the Bush administration, told Downie that since the 9/11 attacks, "the national security role of the government has increased hugely," and led to a "gigantic expansion of the secrecy system, both the number of secrets and the numbers of people with access to secrets."
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