Wikileaks Hits The Jackpot With Congressional Research Service

Politics

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

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.

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