Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks Publishes $1B of Public Domain Research Reports
laird writes "Wikileaks has released
nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year. Although all CRS reports are legally in the public domain, they are quasi-secret because the CRS, as a matter of policy, makes the reports available only to members of Congress, Congressional committees and select sister agencies such as the GAO. Members of Congress are free to selectively release CRS reports to the public but are only motivated to do so when they feel the results would assist them politically. Universally embarrassing reports are kept quiet."
That's good work, folks. Keep it up.
.nosig
"Although all CRS reports are legally in the public domain, they are quasi-secret because the CRS, as a matter of policy, makes the reports available only to members of Congress, Congressional committees and select sister agencies such as the GAO. Members of Congress are free to selectively release CRS reports to the public but are only motivated to do so when they feel the results would assist them politically. Universally embarrassing reports are kept quiet."
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt.
Unreleased reports are the bane of a modern society.
Unfavorable medical studies get buries, Congressional reports that never see the light of day.
Hopefully this ray of sunshine will shake things up and give everyone something to complain about.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It is saddening to have to have this "leaked". It should reside at something like www.Government.us/research/ :(
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
For the .01% of the people who would actually read stuff like this, this is fantastic. It's important that the public has access to this, and a shame that no suitable politician has decided to request all the reports and publish the whole lot (is there any reason this is not the case? Contact your representatives!).
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at, and it'd already be a fulltime job to even try to read everything in a field.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
One kind of corruption is killing people and destroying their property for profit.
More than 1,000,000 people have been killed in Iraq at a final cost of at least $3,000,000,000,000.
That means the U.S. taxpayer is paying $3 million to kill each Iraqi. Iraqis are mostly poor and defenseless. Obviously, the money is going into the pockets of weapons and oil investors.
The U.S. government has done far more damage to Iraq and killed far more people than Saddam Hussein. What is worse is that the U.S. government did it for money; Saddam Hussein wanted political control.
Can't Remember Shit?
Sounds like Congress!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
If research embarrasses some politicians, it should be leaked, because it suggests that reality is not in accordance with those politicians' beliefs, and that therefore those politicians may make wrong decisions.
If research embarrasses all the politicians in Congress, it's even more important that it be leaked.
Open government lawmakers such as Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) have fought for years to make the reports public, with bills being introduced--and rejected--almost every year since 1998.
Oops... maybe I should have voted for McCain.
These are not nearly as 'secret' as the article implies. I used to download and file these in the school law library. Specifically we were collecting intellectual property-related articles, but I had access to hundreds and hundreds of these.
Just because the public isn't widely aware of something doesn't mean its a secret.
They done f*ked with the wrong people now. You thought waterboarding was bad, wait until Pelosi and Reid get a holt of these badboys.
Why wouldn't these reports be available under FOIA? Considering that its "nominally public domain" already, what exemption would it fall under to bar a request?
from http://www.opencrs.com/ "American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service, a "think tank" that provides reports to members of Congress on a variety of topics relevant to current political events. Yet, these reports are not made available to the public in a way that they can be easily obtained."
Suppose someone sends a list to Wikileaks containing all the names of Wikileaks admins and the people behind it.
Would they publish it, so they can stay true to their values, even if this information could effectively mean the end of Wikileaks?
With helpful reports like this one available, it's no wonder that our Congress is the most responsive and insightful bunch of legislators in the world.
This seems like the perfect thing to download and have my search app index. Then whenever I wanted to read about what my Congressman 'knows' about things like FOSS or the IRA, I could find it very quickly. I'm also not sure why FOSS and the IRA are the first two things to come to by mind.
Having looked through some as well, I'd take it a step further.
I don't think there's anything secret in there at ALL.
It's just simple, journalistic-style research and analysis, with information entirely from public sources.
I don't think you're going to find any buried scandals here. At all. You'd probably get more from reading a
good selection of newspapers. Journalists tend to have inside sources, after all.
The worst I could imagine from what I've seen is stuff like "Congressman so-and-so said he didn't know about X..
but he should have if he'd read Congress' own report on it!"
So now that these reports are "released", how many of you, slashdot readers that post in this thread, actually read at least 1 of them in its entirety? How many read 2? 5? Hands, anyone?
I did go to the site. I read 3 reports on a topic that interests me. What I found was a dry, relatively correct, summary of public and well known information. These reports are created so that each congressman (or whoever else may need them) does not have to read every single newspaper, web site or send his staff on a search of basic statistics. The information is not obtained in ways that are inaccessible to you and me, and reports do not seem to provide any particular insight not already available to those who follow the topic (for example I found nothing of interest in these reports, everything was well known to me, because I follow this topic on my own).
There are hundreds of thousands of reports like these prepared in each large (or small) organization on variety of themes. They are not specifically released because, frankly, it is pointless to do so. While some sort of a website with these reports would be a symbol of opennes, it would likely have very little practical applicability. The only people who need these reports are those who need information on topics that they don't personally care very much about (so they don't want to do their own research) but do need for whatever reason to know what's going on. That means: :) :)
1) politicians
2) students, in particular during midterms and finals
1st group has access anyway and 2nd could benefit from doing a bit of research on their own.
Feel free to rate this flamebait.
While interesting, I do think that this should be kept private.
There are a few good reasons to make this public
1. Historians, universities and students will have access to quality material for analysis and correlation.
2. The public will be able to scrutinize and correct incorrect reports ensuring that congress have the correct information.
But consider that you give away your thought processes and the foundations of your strategies to those opponents that should not be privy to your thoughts.
You seem to mean that you love free speech, open access to information, etc. Unfortunately the internet USED to be those things, but now it's as much the opposite as it is that. Too many kids are growing up thinking the internet is whatever comes back in an search on MSN, or whatever their XBox tells them they can get "online" when they pay for it with XBox Live Credits.
Intellectual Property, Computer Software and the Open Source Movement, March 11, 2004
Telecommunications Japans Telecommunications Deregulation: NTTs Access Fees and Worldwide Expansion, August 9, 2000
Telecommunications Act: Competition, Innovation, and Reform, June 7, 2007
Patent-related The Obviousness Standard in Patent Law: KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., May 31, 2007
I don't think publishing such a list would constitute staying true to their values.
How that would mean end of wikileaks?
I've been googling titles of random reports and have yet to find anything that wasn't already available to the public. Has anyone found one that is new?
AFAIK the people behind Wikileaks are anonymous, otherwise the governments and bigwigs whose secrets they publish could retaliate.
So if their identities are revealed then they can be persecuted and they couldn't maintain Wikileaks.
The end result is the old adage I first heard applied to the Chicago political machine of the 1960s: A government does not have to be good, and rarely is. It only has to be good enough that the populace will tolerate it.
An older version of the same adage:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
As many are pointing out, there doesn't seem to be anything especially new in these reports. But nearly a billion dollars for almost 7,000 reports? That's almost $150k per report. I sure hope the CRS does more than just this...
Oh, so you are saying that the cost to kill each Iraqi is MORE than $3 million?
This is a great point/question, but what does this have to do with GP's post asking "Where do I send my donations"?
Their Advisory Board is hardly anonymous, and of course they have a bunch of Contact information that would lead you to owners of domains. I don't know how anonymous Wikileaks is overall; it looks more distributed to me.
People behind wikileaks certainly are not anonymous. http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
This isn't secret information at all; these are reports that are constantly published by the US Government. I think they used to be put in public libraries; I remember researching CRS reports at university libraries in the 80s. Putting them online is something the government should be doing, not Wikileaks, but either way, nobody is going to get in trouble for this, and nobody is going to find any state secrets here.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Advisory_Board
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Since the list of names all start with CRS, the alphabetic list is thousands of reports all in the letter "C".
HA.
CRS= Can't Remember Shit. Aptly named in my opinion! Now where did I put that report...
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
And why do you see it in terms of dollar / Iraqi life ? Do you think the US government is somehow saving up to kill people in Iraq ? If you want to start that game we could easily say that chances of being killed by Hussein infinitely reduced down to zero. Like yours, its a ludicrous factoid that completely obscures whats going on.
Ok, so these reports are available for purchase here. We should not have to purchase them, obviously. Also, it looks the the US-Italian embassy is leaking the crap out of them. z0mg!
What's more, these documents were apparently already available for a fee from this company. All they're doing is (rightly, imho) making them available for free rather than forcing people to pay a publishing company for access to records that we supposedly already own.
Are you suggesting that the need to publish this material for wide dissemination is somehow related to the number of people who would read it; if few people are perceived to read the material there is much reduced need to publish the material?
It seems to me that this conflates how many would read this material with who deserves access to this material. These factors strike me as two independent issues. Much like software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify a computer program) being debated in terms of whether most computer users would actually do these things. Users deserve software freedom without regard to how many take advantage of those freedoms.
Digital Citizen
Maybe it's not possible to embarrass him because he's doing so well on all the major issues of the day: opposing Iraq invasion, opposing continued Iraq occupation, instantiating impeachment, supporting universal single-payer health care, citing Arms Export and Control Act in voting against House Measure which supported Israeli offensive, being the only repeat Democratic Party peace candidate, and speaking firmly based on ethical and legal grounds the whole way through. These are unarguably international issues of substance (as life and death issues so often are) and he's on the correct side of all of them. I ask you for "substantive issues" because I know /. likes to divert attention away from the important take on issues and dwell endlessly in minor or technical quibbles. I've seen him talk and winced a few times, but never on anything that mattered.
Digital Citizen
I'd like to get the fulltext and meta pages of all of these repords in pdf and txt form so I can store them locally and work on them locally (the site is often overloaded at the moment, and advanced full text search is not available). I searched for a way to do that easily. No dice. The only way, it appears, would be to hammer the server with wget and recursively download everything on there. Bad form.
How would not publishing it be a case of not being true to their values?
Like Joe the plumber?
Does that refer to the bribe normally required to access these documents?
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?
There's a torrent link of exactly that on wikileaks
In case the tone of my post was not clear, I believe it's very important that things like this be published - we should have as much government transparency as we can (I would far rather have a transparent liberal autocracy than a secretive representative liberal democracy).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
I'd like to get the fulltext and meta pages of all of these repords in pdf and txt form so I can store them locally and work on them locally ...
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4713076
That is all 2 gigs of them
The reports are ostensibly available in torrent form here. Using this instead of TFA may go some way to mitigating wikileaks' current bandwitdh problems.
Corrupt just like the private sector.
http://wikileaks.org/leak/crs/RL31827.txt
OpenCRS
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
A lot of these are commissioned studies and reflect the viewpoint of the person or group that is asking for it.
Based on this, I would expect to find reports in this list that argue positions such as the native inferority of African Americans, the desirability of the extermination of Jews and/or Muslims, etc.
Would this sort of thing be beneficial to release? The US government has plenty of documents lying around like this and it would do nobody any good. Even the knowledge that someone was paid to think this way or that about a particular topic can be extremely damaging.
It AMAZES me the degree to which Americans hide the corruption of their government from themselves, and make excuses.
The issue is that those reports cost 100 million taxpayer dollars, and they are only given to special interests that are involved with people in Congress, who use them to get what they want, not what the country needs.
http://tinyurl.com/wikileaks-crs-1
how do you verify that these are authentic? just asking.
The USA isn't the worst offender in the area of Government accountability. Canada has its share of problems and has recently been ranked 8th out of 250 countries by the Global Integrity Report.
But at least Canadian government has stepped up and is disclosing certain info like contracts. I have started a project to search/visualize all these contracts at http://www.disclosed.ca/
Why doesn't the US government have a proactive disclosure initiative? Or am I missing something? I know Obama has announced recovery.gov but is that it?
If research embarrasses some politicians, it should be leaked, because it suggests that reality is not in accordance with those politicians' beliefs, and that therefore those politicians may make wrong decisions.
See also "Office of Technological Assessment, Closure of".
It's all the same shit. Bush, Obama... Not any difference!