CDT’s OpenCRS project makes the Congressional Research Service’s taxpayer funded reports more readily available on the Web. As we have mentioned in the past, these reports are written for Congress and help them make legislative decisions. They are now being sold by commercial vendors regularly for $29.95 a piece.

OpenCRS has been getting a lot of new reports in the our core issue areas and we thought that this would be a good tie to start featuring timely reports that would be of interest to PolicyBeta’s readers

Our inaugural CRS Report of the Week is:

Information Security and Data Breach Notification Safeguards
RL34120 - July 31, 2007

CDT Executive Director, Leslie Harris, and I had the privilege to serve on The Open House Project — nonpartisan collaborative effort launched by the Sunlight Foundation to provide suggestions to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on how to make the House of Representatives more open in the Web 2.0 age.

Today, the project issued a report offering 10 common sense suggestions to Pelosi:

• Legislation Database-publish legislative data in structured formats
• Preserving Congressional Information-protect congressional information through archiving and distribution
• Congressional Committees-recognize committees as a public resource by making committee information available online
• Congressional Research Service-share non-partisan research beyond Congress
• Member Web-Use Restrictions-permit members to take full advantage of internet resources
• Citizen Journalism Access-grant House access to non-traditional journalists
• The Office of the Clerk of the House-serve as a source for digital disclosure information
• The Congressional Record-maintain the veracity of a historical document
• Congressional Video-create open video access to House proceedings
• Coordinating Web Standards-commit to technology reform as an administrative priority

If you’re still not sure that you should read the whole report, watch this video promoting the project. You’ll be convinced:

[editors note: This post from CDT Deputy Director Ari Schwartz originally appeared on the Open House Project blog.]

American taxpayers spend over $100 million a year to fund the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which generates detailed reports relevant to current political events for lawmakers. But while the reports are non-classified, and play a critical role in our political process, neither Congress nor the CRS makes them freely available to the public.

To fill that inexplicable void, private entities have begun selling CRS reports, providing lobbyists inside access at a price, while ordinary citizens (whose tax dollars fund the reports in the first place) are left out in the cold.

I hope that Speaker Pelosi will rectify this inequity and provide pubic access to all public CRS reports via the Web.

I can’t say it any better than Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) who have co-sponsored a bill that would finally make the reports available to the public.

Said McCain: “It is not fair for the American people to have to pay a third party for out-of-date products for which they have already footed the bill.”

Adds Leahy: “CRS performs invaluable research and produces first-rate reports on hundreds of topics. American taxpayers have every right to have direct access to these wonderful resources.”

Indeed, CRS reports provide non-biased, non-partisan analysis of the myriad subjects they cover. They are well researched and generally provide a useful introduction and more detailed facts that would be a perfect resource for the curious citizen. What’s more, the reports are a major tool for lawmakers considering new legislation, and as such are of tremendous value to advocates, researchers and academics.

Not surprisingly, the reports are also phenomenally popular with the public when they are made available.

In 2005, my organization, the Center for Democracy & Technology launched the now wildly popular OpenCRS Web site. We collect CRS reports from a number of sources including collections from groups — such as the Federation of American Scientists and the National Council for Science and the Environment — and from individual citizens who obtain the copies of the reports from their elected representatives and then submit them to OpenCRS.

OpenCRS contains 11,491 CRS reports and averages over 5,000 reports downloaded per day for a total of more than 3 million report downloads in less than two years. We built OpenCRS after becoming outraged that companies were charging up to $50 per report, which (in its own warped way) is another measure of their popularity.

The creators of OpenCRS would gladly welcome the posting of all reports from an official source. This would allow us to stop spending effort on gathering and posting reports and focus instead on adding functionality for the public, and maybe even for Congress. And what’s more, as happy as we are with the success of OpenCRS it will never be an adequate substitute for an official government site providing no-cost, real-time access to all of the CRS reports as they are published.

Critics of providing direct access to CRS reports suggest that it will change the way that Members of Congress must operate. In the words of Former Chairman of the House Administration Committee Bob Ney (R-OH), the biggest critic of posting CRS reports in the past:

“Let’s say that I’m working on an issue and I’m trying to look for some research that helps me to get my point across and, all of a sudden, the Congressional Research Service sends me over something and I read it and I say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not going to help.’ Let someone else do the research. Why give your opposition free research?”

The Toledo Blade responded to Ney’s concern very aptly in its 2003 editorial:

“We would answer that question by simply pointing out to Mr. Ney that he doesn’t own the information produced at taxpayer expense, the American public does. And anyone - everyone - has a right to see it.”

Making CRS reports directly available to the public would help provide transparency and accountability to the House’s daily business and would bring an end to a system that unfairly rewards those that have connections or the right resources to get special access to reports that are the rightful property of all taxpayers.

This past weekend, OpenCRS reached an important milestone.  The website, maintained by CDT, hit three million reports downloaded.  The website, as of this writing, contains 11,361 CRS reports that have been collected in a number of ways, including collections from groups such as the Federation of American Scientists and the National Council for Science and the Environment, and from individual citizens requesting reports from Members of Congress, then submitting them to OpenCRS.  The one way they haven’t been collected is straight from the Congressional Research Service itself.

CRS has been a closed book for a long time, and it’s about to get just a bit worse, as Steven Aftergood from Secrecy News reports.  The director of CRS has put in place a new media interaction policy intended to limit CRS researchers’ communications with the media.  We’re not convinced that closing off CRS even further is the right move at this point in time.

Aftergood’s blog post contained an additional interesting note that caught my eye, however, as he points out that CRS is becoming more and more important to the society at large, and to the media in particular.  He mentions that “the number of citations to CRS in the Nexis news database rose from 2,076 in 2004 to 3,101 in 2005 to 4,179 in 2006.”  I think it’s no great coincidence that OpenCRS was launched in the summer of 2005, providing the media with access to the CRS reports they needed to write their stories.

Anyone interested in seeing more CRS reports can do two things: First, check out the front page of OpenCRS and request the report we have listed on the top from your Congressman.  Second, ask your Representative and Senators to support the McCain/Leahy/Shays efforts to force CRS to make its reports readily available to the public.

Earlier today we released our comprehensive legislative recommendations for 2007. This Congress will face a lot of big decisions — on issues ranging from privacy to free speech — that could have lasting impact on the Internet as we know it. In light of the growing attempts among lawmakers in recent years to exert greater control over Internet, that’s a somewhat unnerving concept. But by the same token, this Congress will have a great many opportunities to reestablish an approach to high-tech policy that respects both civil liberties and innovation.

Our agenda, which we’ll be distributing to key lawmakers in Congress in the coming days, includes a short treatise on what lawmakers need to know about Internet policymaking, as well as issue-by-issue legislative recommendations.

The underlying message is this: the Internet did not evolve to become one of the most robust, democratic communications tools the world has ever known by accident. An important element of the Internet’s success can be attributed to policymakers who realized early on that the Internet was different than anything they had yet encountered, and as such it required a different regulatory approach. That message remains true today, and that’s what we’ll be telling lawmakers as the 110th Congress gathers steam.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) and a bipartisan group of 23 Senators have introducuced a bill, S.223 that would require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically. This bill is long overdue, and Feingold should be applauded for pushing this issue. Frankly, the Senate should be embarrassed if this bill is not promptly passed into law.

Candidates for the House of Representatives are required to file their campaign finance reports electronically. The Federal Election Commission can then turn around and immediately make the reports available online. Senate candidates’ reports, in contrast, are only filed in paper form, and it takes a huge amount of effort to key in the data so it is searchable in electronic form. This means, for example, that the last report that is due before a Senate election may not be searchable online until after the election. S.223 would fix this imbalance and make Senate campaign info as readily available as House info.

The availability of campaign finance reports in electronic form has greatly heightened the ability of the public — including political bloggers — to scrutinize the campaign spending of candidates, which has in turn increased the transparency of election campaigns. The blogosphere should strongly support this bill.

CDT joined a friend-of-the court brief filed yesterday asking the Supreme Court to prohibit federal agencies from applying rules that are kept secret from the public. CDT and other civil liberties organizations joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in encouraging the High Court to review the case of Gilmore v. Gonzales. Brought by activist and Internet pioneer John Gilmore, the case challenges the refusal of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to make public the text of a rule that purportedly requires airline passengers to present identification or, alternatively, submit to a more extensive physical search.

Secret law is squarely contrary to the principles of open government that CDT has long advocated. Airline safety is an important national security issue, and CDT has not taken a position on the air-travel ID requirement that originally prompted Gilmore’s suit. We strongly believe, however, that people have a right to know exactly what the law requires of them, even where national security is concerned. Open and accessible rules are necessary in a democratic society so individuals can tailor their behavior to comply with the law — and also keep the government accountable for its actions. The Supreme Court should reject TSA’s assertion that it can keep secret a rule that applies to every single person who travels by commercial aircraft. The case has broad implications. CDT hopes that the Supreme Court, as it has in other areas, will make it clear that the war on terrorism does not trump fundamental values. If allowed to stand, TSA’s conduct could encourage other federal agencies — in the national security context or elsewhere — to secretly make and maintain rules affecting individuals in their daily lives.

Gilmore provides links to all the relevant court documents here.

As we approach election day, fear of voting irregularities due to faulty machines or partisan shenanigans grow. The Internet, however, makes it easier than ever for those concerned about proper voting to coordinate with one another and investigate incidents of concern. The people behindVoterStory.org have done exactly that. have done exactly that. They are collecting the nation’s stories about voting experiences and passing them on to those who can hopefully help in each case.

It’s a nice change of pace to talk about a good piece of legislation coming out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Last week the panel approved the Open Government Act, a bill which strengthens and makes a number of key improvements to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

As we said last year in a letter to bill sponsors John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) applauding the measure, the public has a right to know what the government is doing on its behalf, and FOIA is a vital tool toward that end. The Open Government Act closes many of the loopholes left open by FOIA, and rightly takes advantage of the power of the Internet to disseminate public information.

Another welcome aspect of the measure is that it requires government agencies to respond in a timelier manner to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. Under the bill, agencies would be required to provide information within 20 days of receiving a FOIA request or be subject to penalties.

The one catch? Timing. While we applaud the Judiciary Committee for passing the bill, it is going to be tough to get it all the way to the President’s desk in the busy days before lawmakers head home in the run-up to the midterm elections.

In a big victory for open government, the Senate unanimously passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590), which would significantly increase the transparency and disclosure of federal spending information.

The bill, sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), would direct the Office of Management and Budget to create a publicly-available Web site that would list every entity receiving federal financial assistance, such as grants or contracts, and the totals awarded for each fiscal year.

The bill faced some opposition, but a strong left-right coalition led by OMB Watch and the National Taxpayers Union — and hard work by the bill’s sponsors eventually convinced leadership to bring the measure to the floor where it passed easily. CDT hopes that this coalition can stay together and put pressure on the House to resist calls to weaken this legislation, and instead approve the exact Senate language.