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!
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
Ya.. maybe you should have voted for McCain.. the same guy that said on during his nomination acceptance speech that he would vote against any bill that was filled with pork. A few weeks later he voted FOR the EESA/TARP after it was ladled up with $150 billion in pork specifically to get it through The Senate! Ya, he's a real stand up guy.
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.
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.
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.
*sigh*
Of course, always blame it on 1984..
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.
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!
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.
I'll tell you what's going on: government documents which are intrinsically public domain are being held behind artificially constructed "pay" walls erected by private companies. It's not an uncommon practice, not only in federal government but all the way down to local city and county governments, and in the past it actually made small amounts of sense. In the pre-internet days distributing documents cost non-trivial amounts of money because physical copies had to be made. Now that the Internet has driven those costs to nearly zero, there is no longer any excuse for these private companies to be acting as the gatekeepers for information about our own government. We should work to tear down these old arrangements and allow people to access government information for free, straight from the source. That's what's going on here.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
We should draft random people to become politicians.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
And the geek shall inherit the Earth.
There's a torrent link of exactly that on wikileaks
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.
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.
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.