Wikileaks and CRS

[Clay Shirky]

From the Wikileaks announcement list:

3. Wikileaks to release nearly 10,000 Congressional Research Service
reports
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wikileaks has obtained nearly 10,000 US Congressional Research
Service (CRS) reports which it is preparing for publication. The
CRS spends around $100M a year preparing high quality reports for
members of Congress and Congressional committees. When members feel
publication of a report is in their political interest, they are
released. Alternatively reports that are not viewed as politically
favorable are kept from the public eye.

If you can meaningfully sponsor the presentation and indexing of
these important reports, contact wl-...@sunshinepress.org.

[James Jacobs]

thanks for the leak! FYI, Stanford Library is building a CRS report
collection built from harvests of myriad sites that post CRS reports:
http://www.archive-it.org/home/SSRG. These harvests make their way
into the internet archive for preservation. I would think that U of
North Texas CRS Report collection (http://digital.library.unt.edu/
govdocs/crs/) would be a great place to present and index this new
treasure trove of reports. Starr Hoffman (Starr....@unt.edu) is
the librarian dealing with the UNT collection.

cheers,

James Jacobs
Government Information Librarian
Stanford University Libraries

[Daniel Schuman]

Check out the Center for Democracy and Technology, which has a massive meta-index, hosts a ton of reports, and has  the great site: http://opencrs.com/ They also have a way, I think, to upload huge batches.

You can contact them online (http://opencrs.com/contact) or call 1.202.637.9800

Daniel

[Joshua Ruihley]

This is excellent news! Open CRS is always willing to host the reports, but we think it's better to have as many collections out there as possible.  It would be great if wikileaks posted their own collection, or passed it to UNT or Stanford per James Jacobs' suggestion.  Whatever happens, the reports need to end up at a library where they can be properly archived and made available to the public.  Wherever this batch ends up, Open CRS will add it to the site.  With that, we think that at Open CRS, we should practice what we preach.  We're happy to announce that we will soon be adding an API to allow programmatic access to all reports in the Open CRS database.  Let us know if there's anything specific you'd like to see in the API and we'll do our best to add it for you.  Thanks.

Joshua Ruihley
Open CRS

[Josh Tauberer]

I actually think this is awful news. To me, the horrible thing about CRS
reports isn't that they're unavailable to the public, it's that someone
is making a buck off of probably illegally sneaking them out of the CRS
--- and what's more, that CRS hasn't addressed this.

The fact that more reports are available means the case is harder to
push that something really and clearly wrong is going on.

--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us

http://razor.occams.info

"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)

> govdocs/crs/ <http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/>)

> would be a great place to present and index this new
> treasure trove of reports. Starr Hoffman (Starr....@unt.edu

> <mailto:Starr....@unt.edu>) is

> the librarian dealing with the UNT collection.
>
> cheers,
>
> James Jacobs
> Government Information Librarian
> Stanford University Libraries
>
> On Jan 28, 6:59 am, Clay Shirky <cl...@shirky.com

> <mailto:cl...@shirky.com>> wrote:
> > From the Wikileaks announcement list:
> >
> > 3. Wikileaks to release nearly 10,000 Congressional Research
> Service
> > reports
> >
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> >
> > Wikileaks has obtained nearly 10,000 US Congressional Research
> > Service (CRS) reports which it is preparing for publication. The
> > CRS spends around $100M a year preparing high quality reports for
> > members of Congress and Congressional committees. When
> members feel
> > publication of a report is in their political interest, they are
> > released. Alternatively reports that are not viewed as
> politically
> > favorable are kept from the public eye.
> >
> > If you can meaningfully sponsor the presentation and indexing of
> > these important reports, contact wl-...@sunshinepress.org

> <mailto:wl-...@sunshinepress.org>.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >

[Clay Shirky]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 10:30 PM, Julian Assange
<jul...@sunshinepress.org> wrote:
> Totally free access will not happen,
> for political dynamics, but we can go from opt in to opt out and leak
> the rest.

It happened with the weather, it happened with SEC data, why can't it
happen with CRS?

-c

[Josh Tauberer]

Wikileaks Office wrote:
> Please feel reassured that no one made any buck from 'sneaking' those out. They came for free.

Ooops! I'm sorry for not giving the right context. I didn't mean
Wikileaks made a buck! One forgets that not everyone on the list
memorized our Open House Report. :)

GalleryWatch, possibly among other companies, sells access to the reports:
http://gallerywatch.com/crsreports

At some point they partnered with what I think is the original gangster
here, Penny Hill Press: http://www.crsdocuments.com/

Here's our report chapter on the subject, which might be a little
outdated now:
http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/the-open-house-project-report/6-congressional-research-service/

[Peggy Garvin]

On 1/28/09 9:35 PM, "Clay Shirky" <cl...@shirky.com> wrote:
> It happened with the weather, it happened with SEC data, why can't it
> happen with CRS?
>
> -c

Because the administration and environment of Congress are different than
the administration and environment of the executive branch? (One argument
for "branchism" on this list.)

I fully endorse all efforts to store CRS reports at distributed institutions
because at least we are building up a public archive of our federal
legislative history. If this tactic also prompts Congress to accept a role
in real-time distribution of the full stream of CRS reports to the public**,
great. Check that one off the list.

[**The actual Open House recommendation is more modest; see,
http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/the-open-house-project-report/6-congressi
onal-research-service/ ]

If someone has a method for freeing the full stream of CRS reports and their
frequent updates gratis and on a reliable ongoing basis without the
cooperation of Congress, the first effect I guess that would have is to put
a big dent in Gallery Watch's CRS report database business. Congress may
still look the other way; I don't know. Is the ultimate goal still to get
Congress to recognize in their rules or in a statute that the legislative
branch is required to make CRS reports publicly available?

I am not disagreeing with Clay. I am adding the caveat that outside action
may cause a different reaction from Congress than it has from executive
branch agencies.

Peggy

[James Jacobs]

Good points made all around. I think we all agree that CRS reports are
among the most valuable (and least known) publications that the govt
produces. Federal Depository Libraries (see fdlp.gov) have been trying
almost since 1916 to shake CRS reports loose and make them be
distributed to libraries via the FDLP. You can add LexisNexis to the
list of publishers/vendors who've profited from CRS. Many libraries
get reports on microfiche (see "Major studies and issue briefs of the
Congressional Research Service" http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4348480&referer=brief_results).
LN recently digitized all their CRS reports (http://www.lexisnexis.com/
help/cu/Misc/CRDC.htm) and I hear tell that CRS actually subscribes to
the LN product because they don't have a complete archive :-|

What I'd really like to see, besides the various places on the tubes
to get the reports, is for OpenCRS (maybe in conjunction with UNT) to
make available bibliographic records of the reports so that libraries
could add them to their catalogs. The Office of Scientific & Technical
Information (http://www.osti.gov/marcrecords) has recently started to
do that. They're able to automatically convert their metadata into
MARC.

Perhaps all of these various projects banging on CRS's doors for
access will finally get them to change their policies and distribute
their reports far and wide.

James

On Jan 29, 7:51 am, Peggy Garvin <pe...@garvinconsulting.com> wrote:

> On 1/28/09 9:35 PM, "Clay Shirky" <c...@shirky.com> wrote:
>
> > It happened with the weather, it happened with SEC data, why can't it
> > happen with CRS?
>
> > -c
>
> Because the administration and environment of Congress are different than
> the administration and environment of the executive branch? (One argument
> for "branchism" on this list.)
>
> I fully endorse all efforts to store CRS reports at distributed institutions
> because at least we are building up a public archive of our federal
> legislative history. If this tactic also prompts Congress to accept a role
> in real-time distribution of the full stream of CRS reports to the public**,
> great. Check that one off the list.
>

> [**The actual Open House recommendation is more modest; see,http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/the-open-house-project-report/6-co...

[John Wonderlich]

If this is true, it's scandalous:

I hear tell that CRS actually subscribes to
the LN product because they don't have a complete archive :-|

There should be a word for this, where our government pays private services for its own information, cf. Malamud versus West re: the GAO's doomed effort to digitize their legislative histories.  :(

[Josh Tauberer]

James Jacobs wrote:
> You can add LexisNexis to the
> list of publishers/vendors who've profited from CRS. Many libraries
> get reports on microfiche (see "Major studies and issue briefs of the
> Congressional Research Service" http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/4348480&referer=brief_results).

How do they get the microfiches?

[James Jacobs]

supposedly someone from LN periodically goes over to the CRS offices
and fills up a shopping bag(s). then they bring them back to LN
offices and scan them for distribution.

I agree that it's scandalous. our representatives have lots of
privileges born in a different time -- including making CRS reports
available or not to their constituents as well as things like editing
ex post facto the Congressional Record (look up Hale Boggs for a
particularly egregious example
http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/the-open-house-project-report/10-the-congressional-record/).
These privileges need to be examined as part of any transparency
initiative.

james