For the third consecutive year, the Office of the Vice President has refused to disclose information on its security classification practices, according to a report released last month. The refusal contradicts a presidential order to disclose data on classification and declassification, issued by President Clinton and amended by President Bush in 2003. The National Archive's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) is required by Executive Order 12958 to produce an annual report on statistics and analysis of the security classification program. The 2005 Report to the President documented a decrease in the number of classifications, but it also notes that "The Office of the Vice President (OVP), the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), and the Homeland Security Council (HSC) failed to report their data to ISOO this year." The missing information means the ISOO report is incomplete and may misrepresent the state of classification practices at the federal level. President Bush increased the vice president's classification authority to that of the President in 2003. Vice President Cheney, however, has also refused to report his office's classification data since 2003, so there is no way to determine if this change in authority has resulted in any change in activity. The Office of the Vice President asserts that the order does not apply to it, even though the office regularly complied with the order before 2003. The implementing directive for ISOO states, "Each agency that creates or handles classified information shall report annually to the Director of ISOO statistics related to its security classification program." An agency is defined as any "entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information." Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists remarked that Vice President Cheney's decision "signals an unhealthy contempt for presidential authority and undermines the integrity of classification oversight." Vice President Cheney's refusal to disclose this information is consistent with previous positions and actions taken by the White House to limit access to records. For example, the Vice President has vehemently refused to disclose information on the highly questioned Energy Task Force, even when Congress began an investigation and several court challenges were filed.