Open Access News

Wikileaks has succeeded in its plan to create OA for thousands of CRS Reports.  From the site:

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 the financial collapse. 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.

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. The CRS, as a branch of Congress, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

CRS reports are highly regarded as non-partisan, in-depth, and timely. The reports top the list of the "10 Most-Wanted Government Documents" compiled by the Washington based Center for Democracy and Technology. The Federation of American Scientists, in pushing for the reports to be made public, stated that the "CRS is Congress' Brain and it's useful for the public to be plugged into it." While Wired magazine called their concealment "The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age".

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....

However that hasn't stopped a grey market forming around the documents. Opportunists smuggle out nearly all reports and sell them to cashed up special interests--lobbyists, law firms, multi-nationals, and presumably, foreign governments. Congress has turned a blind eye to special interest access, while continuing to vote down public access....

Free from meaningful public oversight of its work, the CRS, as "Congress's brain", is able to influence Congressional outcomes, even when its reports contain errors. Arguably, its institutional power over congress is second only to the parties themselves. Public oversight would reduce its ability to exercise that influence without criticism. That is why it opposes such oversight, and that is why such oversight must be established immediately.

In 1913 Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a forceful proponent for open government, stated "Sunlight is the best disinfectant; electric light the most efficient policeman". Those wise words are still true today.

Welcome, Congress, to our generation's electric sun.

Thanks to Brock Meeks of CDT for the alert and these comments:

...It also seems that Wikileaks now has found a source to get all new and updated reports.

For years CDT has run the OpenCRS project as a way to provide access to CRS reports. OpenCRS has aggregated the non-classified, non-confidential reports posted by our partners, including the Federation of American Scientists and the National Council for Science and the Environment, as well as those submitted directly to OpenCRS. Through these means, we estimate that OpenCRS has been getting about 80% of new reports. Thanks to Wikileaks, which provided OpenCRS with a full download of all the reports they collected, the project now houses the most up-to-date and historical record of these reports....

Now that Wikileaks has put these documents up, we see little reason for Congress to keep up its façade that artificially restricts public access to these critically informative reports despite the fact that pay services have had all of these reports available to those with the money for years. Perhaps now Members will move quickly to pass legislation to provide quick and easy access to these reports and bring a halt the ridiculous cloak-and-dagger atmosphere that to-date has surrounded their release.

PS:  Kudos to all involved.  See our past posts on the many efforts to break through the secrecy and toll access to share these useful reports with the public.

Update (2/11/09).  Also see Brian Krebs' article in today's Washington Post:

Open government groups scored a small but potentially decisive victory this week in a long-running battle to win publication of thousands of secret reports that Congress uses to fashion new laws.

Each year, with the help of more than $100 million in funding from Congress, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) produces thousands of reports on legislative policy issues ranging from farm subsidies to weapons sales. While the reports are neither copyrighted nor classified, their release has been solely at the discretion of lawmakers.

But on Monday, Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents, published thousands of previously unreleased CRS reports. At the same time, the group says it is on track to receive a steady stream of new reports, which it plans to feed to open government groups and directly to consumers via its Web site....

The Wikileaks Web site was temporarily unavailable for several hours on Monday as nearly five million visitors tried to download the massive 2 GB archive. Schmitt called the public response unprecedented....

In years past, several lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully to garner support for making the CRS reports directly available to citizens online. One such proponent, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (ID-Conn.), praised the action by Wikileaks, saying he hopes to work with the Senate Rules Committee "to create a comprehensive and officially-sanctions system for releasing CRS reports to the public."

"I have long argued that CRS reports should be made more widely available to the public, in part because they are produced at public expense and because broad dissemination supports the goal of greater government transparency," Lieberman said. "Wikileaks's recent action demonstrates the futility of any effort to limit distribution of those reports."

The secrecy of the reports has created a bootleg market for the documents. Gallery Watch, owned by the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, has sold the CRS reports for years. Gallery Watch declined to comment for this story....

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