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."
Just a note, the (C) in CRS stands for "Congressional". It operates under legislation, not executive order, so changing its policies requires a little more than changing who is president.
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!).
The original article states that politicians are only motivated to release information that potentially helps them politically. There is very likely to be information which would be politically dangerous. e.g. information lobby groups do not want know. Anyway what's to say it wasn't a politician who gave the information to Wikileaks?
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?
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.
For all we know, this was "leaked" by someone in the administration who wanted to bypass the years of red type required to simply release the stuff...