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
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.
I actually went though and read a few at random, and there's nothing super-secret there.
The documents are actually reassuring because they state that people are aware that things are wrong. Among the few I briefly scanned are paraphrased thusly: "Oil companies are fixing prices and US law should render oil cartels illegal", "CEO's make way too much damn money, even as their companies are being run into the ground", etc.
Again, the documents are basically admissions that our country is fucked up. Disclaimer: I haven't scanned all of them, and I hope that the discussion turns up interesting facts.
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.
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt.
Human beings are extremely corrupt.
There, fixed that for ya.
Kill all humans!
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.
All governments are corrupt. From nations down to neighborhood associations.
It is the nature of some men and women to seek power over others, and because of this driving need, they are more likely to end up in government positions than other persons who might be more qualified in all kinds of ways, but who are not attracted to power. It is also true that those who are ethically unencumbered are more likely to win the races they enter than anyone who tries to follow the rules. 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.
The US Constitution was built with this in mind. Its system of checks and balances are designed to keep the natural corruptive nature of politics reined in by making it very difficult for any one individual or group from obtaining across the board power. I think we could now design a better system, since we know a lot more now, and we have some neat technologies that were not available back in the day. But so long as what we've got is good enough, that's not going to happen.
Wikileaks has just raised the bar by shining light into some murky corners. Back room deals and cover-ups that used to be good enough are not good enough any longer... and that's a big win for the Nation.
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt.
Corruption is a fairly common attribute of government. Regardless of when and where in human history you look... Power can both corrupt and attract the corrupt/easily corruptable. What's actually more worrying is when people display such great faith that "their government" is immune to or free of corruption.
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?
Pelosi will Rickroll them into submission?
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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."
It is also true that those who are ethically unencumbered are more likely to win the races they enter than anyone who tries to follow the rules.
Apparently if you smoke a little weed every now and again you can kick ass in the swimming pool.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
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?
More than 1,000,000 people have been killed in Iraq at a final cost of at least $3,000,000,000,000.
Really? Cause last I heard, they pretty much just made that shit up.
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.
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.
That's a little redundant. IMO, "good enough" means doing everything you've said there, not necessarily as well as can be done but they do it. He wasn't saying "good" as in the white knight sense, as corruption is not the same thing as evil.
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.
Those who desire power tend to be the least deserving of it.
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.
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.
Those who desire power tend to be the least deserving of it.
Those who desire power tend to be those who can least be trusted with it.
There, fixed that for ya.
Fight the power!
Since the list of names all start with CRS, the alphabetic list is thousands of reports all in the letter "C".
HA.
More importantly, they seem to be collection of information from public sources that legislators can quickly read up. And since they report sources (newspapers, congressional reports etc.) , they sound very fair and balanced.
This is far from secret information, but is a great thing to read when you need background information on policy matters. Also gives an idea what legislators are looking at when they have to vote on items they have no clue about.
Kudos to the guys who wrote this stuff up
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
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!
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.
Occupational hazard of a free society. I'll deal with it.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
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
We should draft random people to become politicians.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
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
And the geek shall inherit the Earth.
Yes really, your own link provides no clear evidence either way. Sounds about right to me.
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 guess that would make it truly a representative government.
Stop! Dremel time!
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
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Corrupt just like the private sector.
Kind of like jury duty?
"Really, I'd love to go to Washington DC and represent my area, but unfortunately I have a dentist appointment that week..."
http://wikileaks.org/leak/crs/RL31827.txt
Yes (more info)
http://outcampaign.org/
Both sides of this argument have debatable value.
On one hand, the everyday person is less likely to be the aforementioned power-seeking personality, and has not had to compromise or ignore better values to beat the competition. They did not have to work their way up through the political world, and, thus, they may likely have a less influenced or constricted view of solving problems. They could bring a detached logic to systems and procedures that have gotten too bogged down in themselves.
On the other hand, a more ordinary person, given such power without the preparation or experience of the political world, is likely to become little more than a tool of smooth-talking, manipulative power-seekers. They would not have reliable mentors or experience that would allow them to identify and withstand others' self-serving deception. Experienced politicians fill the same sort of need as having an attorney to guide a person through the maze of legal procedure and argument-- there are plenty of traps and details, both logical and absurd, relevant and irrelevant, that would blindside the average person.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I'd say that the fact that the methodology is closed, and the data is not peer-reviewed, pretty much screams "made up" to me. I put it on par with the "Windows TCO is lower than Linux TCO" study.
Draft a group of fifty at random, let anyone in that group who wants to drop out do so, and let people vote amongst the candidates that are left. That should at least weed out a few of the sociopaths and mentally challenged who would eventually be selected by a purely random process. Anyone who serves is taken out of the pool, as is anyone convicted of a felony.
Of course, the down side would potentially be that the power vultures would descend on the lot of them and corrupt or destroy them before we had a chance to elect a decent one. I suppose we could put the candidates in an isolated facility with television, radio, and Internet capabilities for a month or so and let them convince us who to vote for. It would be a hugely popular reality show.
The Secret Service would swoop down on the potential candidates in helicopters and ask them on live camera if they choose to serve or not. They have two minutes to decide, and may choose to call one 'life-line' for help making the decision. If they choose to serve, they would be whisked off to the top secret isolation facility.
We could also surround the facility with vicious animals and deadly traps and let any lobbyists that managed to make it to the place alive get their say. Drug them, blindfold them, leave them naked in the wilderness with only a towel and a bowie knife. I'd watch that. We could then let the audience vote on whether to discharge the traps or release the hounds as the lobbyists passed by. "NO honey! That's a Greenpeace activist, what are you doing don't press the-" "Aaaaiiiieeeeee!" "Sorry, sweetie, I think they're kooks." "You are SO sleeping on the couch tonight!"
While they were isolated, the media and sleuths both amateur and professional would, of course, go nuts on their backgrounds. Every character flaw would be exposed and debated, every detail from their past picked over for hints about their true positions. Only narcissists, fools, the naive, and the truly innocent would volunteer when their names were called. Our job would be to separate the last from the first three.
As long as we kept a very careful watch on the selection process to make sure their was no fraud or bias in the system, it seems like it would be a better system than we have now, especially if we had a voting system that followed the Condorcet method. We would, at the very least, tend to have the most attractive politicians in the world.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
sortition (aka "election by lot")
not the worst idea in the world, actually
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
OpenCRS
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I keep re-reading through this, but I am not getting the part where you see this as different than what we do now?
Liberty uber alles.
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.
Ah, yes! Use force! Only by taking away freedom (the freedom not to be a politician) can we protect freedom!
That's my knee-jerk reaction, and it's like that for a reason--just about the only thing anyone ever proposes is more force. Forcing banks to lend money to people that wouldn't have qualified for loans under the bank's own rules, coupled with the creation (again, through force of federal law) things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which gave institutions a place to unburden themselves of that debt, got us into the mess we have now. And the first thing people think (well, to give them credit, they did stop it the first time, but when the fear mongering set in, they caved) is "the government should do something". And when they say that, they mean "by force".
Every time you think of or hear of a possible government solution to a problem, ask yourself if this is just another scheme to try to use force to make things the way someone thinks they should be. Force is seductive--it looks so easy. End poverty! Take all the rich bastards' money and give it to the poor! Stop the horrors of drug addiction! Make drugs illegal! Prostitution is immoral! Make it illegal! Pornography {feminist: victimizes women!} {religious right:offends God!} It should be illegal!
The alternative is _so_ _much_ _more_ _work_! It staggers the mind to think of what it would take to teach, encourage, get people to choose to do the thing you think is right. Some of them might not ever do it. It would be _so_ _much_ _easier_ to just _make_ them! And that, basically, is what you get from the left and the right. A plan to force others to do things they way they think they should be done.
The thing is, the people that are in positions of power aren't the problem. It's the power that we have conceded to them. The constitution does not give the government the right to do 1/3rd (made that up, I bet it's actually smaller) of what it does. What we should do is work to reign government back to what the constitution says it is. Then you can fret less about who gets elected, because they will have less power to mess up your life.
Liberty uber alles.
That's kinda what we do in the UK with the house of Lords. Some folks (fewer now than before) get to inherit their position and ability to influence government.
people complain about unelected lords passing judgement, but there are advantages to having folks who never need to stand for election in a position to delay or modify laws. As an example, recently the house of lords has been instrumental in stopping the government proposal to allow 42 days detention without charge.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
We should draft random people to become politicians.
This was tried before - in a few ancient Greek city-states, notably in Athens. Actually in Athens there were a number of restrictions - age, gender and status-related - but it was by and large a random allotment to administrative roles. The Athenian experiment is educational, and relevant today, even though it happened 2,500 years ago. That Wikipedia page summarises it better than I can.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
how do you verify that these are authentic? just asking.
Close, so close. It's actually crab people that are the problem.
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?
There's no random selection, and no balance inherent in the system. Simply outspend your competition, and you're statistically more likely to get voted in - simply because you have more name recognition.
:-)
Here you introduce random selection via a jury-duty style lottery, and then all the candidates are on the same equal budgetary footing. The rest is the still the same.
Yet we "force" people into Jury Duty.
His plan results in lobbyists getting killed on live TV. And it uses the Condorcet method.
Corruption is a fairly common attribute of government. Regardless of when and where in human history you look... Power can both corrupt and attract the corrupt/easily corruptible. What's actually more worrying is when people display such great faith that "their government" is immune to or free of corruption.
There are days when I think that we need to twick a few parts of how government is run. First off we like elections, so we've got to keep those. What we don't like is the political parties and politicians that we get stuck with. I'd like a nice easy app that would plop out the nearest valid citizen to run for office/be drafted into office given a lat/log position. Every time the local level on up that there is an elected position that doesn't have anyone running to fill it or that has only one person running, we'd use the the little app to generate a valid name from within that town, county, or state. That name would show up on the ballot. (Actually, I think every elected position should have 3-5 choices and the incubate shouldn't be labeled as such on the ballot.) This would mean our actual government would be more like the class room governments that we had in school. No one wants to do the job, so the teacher just randomly picks a few names from the class and we vote which of the two has to take the job.
I also think those that want to run for any elected office should serve a community service prison sentence after their term in office (the term of service is the length of the time that they were in office.) Actually community service isn't quite where I think that they need to be, but I think then we could potentially get some useful work out of politicians after they are out of office. (This assumes and treats all politicians like criminals just to be on the safe side.)
Yeah, that's not necessarily the right thing to do, either. What would happen if people voluntarily opted out, for example? I don't know. People have explored possibilities there.
If pressed I could concede jury duty for a few weeks much easier than forcing someone to change careers.
Liberty uber alles.