Wikileaks kicks out the jams: 1000s of Congressional Research Service reports now released!

The Congressional Research Service [1] is an obscure wonky staff office (annual budget: $100 million!) of the U.S. Congress that releases policy analyses on a variety of subjects, but these reports are traditionally not released to the general public. If you somehow caught word of something good in one of their reports, you had to either get it through skeezy Beltway info peddlers or via the offices of your congressional representatives. Interestingly, the CRS has lobbied to prevent its own work product from going out to the general public.

Fortunately, the rockstars at Wikileaks.org [2] have gotten ahold of BILLION DOLLARS of research, more than 6000 new documents [3] out there. Here's the chronological index [4], the alphabetical index [5], and OpenCRS.com must be having a party right now [6]. NICE!! (And if you have a spare dime, increasingly popular/legally embattled WikiLeaks could really use it!) If anyone finds anything interesting, post it!! (h/t cryptome.org [7])

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By HongPong 2009-02-08 16:50

URL: http://agonist.org/hongpong/20090208/wikileaks_kicks_out_the_jams_1000s_of_congressional_research_service_reports_now_released

Links:
[1] http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo/
[2] http://wikileaks.org
[3] http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Change_you_can_download:_a_billion_in_secret_Congressional_reports
[4] http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS_reports_by_date
[5] http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Category:Congressional_Research_Service
[6] http://opencrs.com/
[7] http://cryptome.org

Wikileaks公开了容量超过2G的、号称价值有10亿美元的准秘密级研究报告，这些报告皆是美国国会委托完成智囊团“国会研究机构（Congressional Research Service，CRS）完成的。 报告数量共计6780份，超过127000页。内容覆盖了大量敏感问题，从美国与以色列关系，到金融危机，到DRM和合理使用（Fair use），到堕胎法。其中有大约2300份报告是在过去12个月内更新的，年代最久的报告要回溯到1990年。CRS每年的预算有1亿美元，拿得是纳税人的钱。依照法律，分析报告理应在公有领域发布，包括麦凯恩在内的政府立法者多年一直呼吁并提出议案公开CRS报告，但每次都被拒绝。CRS的报告只提供给国会议员，国会委员会成员，和其它姐妹机构如美国总审计局（GAO）。国会成员如果觉得报告对他们有利，则会选择性的发布其中一部分。对他们不利的也就视作保密了。 BT(海盗湾种子)，在线浏览，压缩档下载(2.3 Gb)