Wikileaks Hits The Jackpot With Congressional Research Service

from the transparency-is-the-name-of-the-game dept

Mon, Feb 9th 2009 7:37am — Mike Masnick

A bunch of folks have been submitting the rather impressive fact that Wikileaks now has 6,780 reports from the Congressional Research Service free to download. As the post on Wikileaks notes, CRS reports are technically public domain, but have remained in a quasi-secret state, because CRS only releases them to members of Congress. However, the research reports tend to be considered quite credible, non-partisan, timely and useful. That's often why Congress members don't want them anywhere near the public. However, there have been some members of Congress who recognize what a travesty this is, and have been pushing to make the reports open. You have to wonder if a staffer for one of them is responsible for the "leak."

It's great, then, to see these documents get some well-deserved, and much-needed sunlight. However, the really interesting thing will be what the response is from both Congress and the CRS -- both of whom have mostly fought against any attempts to publicly release the documents. It will also be worth watching whether or not these leaks continue as new CRS research comes out, or if there will be something of a crackdown to try (and inevitably fail) to get this information out there.

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Filed Under: congress, congressional research service, public domain, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

5 Comments

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Dan J., 9 Feb 2009 @ 8:39am

FOIA
If the documents are public domain and government produced, anyone know why they aren't subject to FOIA requests?
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- hongpong, 9 Feb 2009 @ 9:09am
  
  Re: FOIA
  Apparently not subject to FOIA because it is a branch of the Congress, which gets to have secrets secrets apparently.
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Anna, 9 Feb 2009 @ 9:06am

Open CRS
This is great. It's especially great that they also sent them to Open CRS, http://opencrs.com/, which had an extensive collection of CRS reports already. Wikileaks might have added a few thousand to the list, but Open CRS is still the place to go for these types of reports.
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please, 9 Feb 2009 @ 11:12am

Open CRS
please OpenCRS have been doing this for years, nothing new - take a look around:

http://opencrs.com/
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- Andrew, 9 Feb 2009 @ 11:33am
  
  Re: Open CRS
  please - nothing new?
  
  Of the 6,731 reports we sent to OpenCRS, 6,284 were new to the OpenCRS collection.
  
  Many CRS reports focus on long-term issues, such as the United States relationship with other countries, or key legislation. These reports keep the same report number over decades of editions. Of the 6,284 reports not in OpenCRS, 4,079 were new editions and 2,205 were completely new.
  
  Doesn't look that way to me.
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