Wikileaks Publishes $1B of Public Domain Research Reports 231
laird writes "Wikileaks has released
nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. The 6,780 reports, current as of this month, comprise over 127,000 pages of material on some of the most contentious issues in the nation, from the U.S. relationship with Israel to abortion legislation. Nearly 2,300 of the reports were updated in the last 12 months, while the oldest report goes back to 1990. The release represents the total output of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) electronically available to Congressional offices. The CRS is Congress's analytical agency and has a budget in excess of $100M per year. Although all CRS reports are legally in the public domain, they are quasi-secret because the CRS, as a matter of policy, makes the reports available only to members of Congress, Congressional committees and select sister agencies such as the GAO. Members of Congress are free to selectively release CRS reports to the public but are only motivated to do so when they feel the results would assist them politically. Universally embarrassing reports are kept quiet."
Where do I send my donations? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where do I send my donations? (Score:5, Informative)
There you go!
Would Wikileaks publish a document about itself? (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose someone sends a list to Wikileaks containing all the names of Wikileaks admins and the people behind it.
Would they publish it, so they can stay true to their values, even if this information could effectively mean the end of Wikileaks?
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I don't think publishing such a list would constitute staying true to their values.
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AFAIK the people behind Wikileaks are anonymous, otherwise the governments and bigwigs whose secrets they publish could retaliate.
So if their identities are revealed then they can be persecuted and they couldn't maintain Wikileaks.
not really anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
Their Advisory Board [wikileaks.org] is hardly anonymous, and of course they have a bunch of Contact information [wikileaks.org] that would lead you to owners of domains. I don't know how anonymous Wikileaks is overall; it looks more distributed to me.
Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
Unreleased reports are the bane of a modern society.
Unfavorable medical studies get buries, Congressional reports that never see the light of day.
Hopefully this ray of sunshine will shake things up and give everyone something to complain about.
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A lot of people go on about government conspiracies but there is no reason for the government to do anything in secret because it can be done out in the open and most people won't take notice and if they do find out odds are they won't care enough to do anything about it.
Re:Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
Your staggering level of cynicism has been duly noted, but it doesn't change the fact that releasing these reports is beneficial for everyone even if every single person doesn't have an explicit interest in them. As a comparison, relatively few people actually ever utilize their 1st Amendment right to say unpopular things, but the fact that the right exists is invaluable.
And yes, I do wonder why studies sponsored by my tax dollars weren't publicly available to begin with.
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Who is going to take time to read this and miss out on American Idol?
Oh shit am I missing an episode? I better get off slashdot and turn on my TV!
Re:Sunshine (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people go on about government conspiracies but there is no reason for the government to do anything in secret because it can be done out in the open and most people won't take notice and if they do find out odds are they won't care enough to do anything about it.
Lets start with government conspiracies. Two examples: telecom spying and extraordinary renditions. The first was done secretly, but journalists knew long before they made it public. The second was done out in the open and a small group of private citizens tracked a fleet of secret CIA jets to a variety of international destinations (which proved hugely embarrassing to quite a few intermediate European countries).
Most people don't have to take notice, nor do they have to care enough to do anything about it.
All that matters is that all of the time, some part of the populace cares and is capable of making a good case why "most people" should too.
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No one has to.
1) What is your agenda?
2) Find data relating to that agenda.
3) Cite relevant reports on that agenda. People who don't read sources won't matter, but those who do can see reports from the *government* about it.
4) Advance cause.
5) ????
6) PROFIT
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They will just be classified 'national security issues' and stuck in a cabinet forever.
THen you wont even know what you are missing out on.
Saddening (Score:5, Insightful)
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> www.Government.us/research/
Ahem. www.crs.gov/reports, lest ye forget the Internet's roots as the U.S. DARPANET.
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So start a campaign to get them all published. It's not an executive or judicial branch issue, so focus on congress. Start a grass roots campaign, get some publicity, and embarrass congress into making the reports public. The secret to getting something published in the main stream press is to write the article yourself and give it to a reporter to claim as their own. It has to be well written, generally accessible, and interesting.
Wait, this is slashdot, and that's a lot of work. So just whine about i
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Re:Saddening (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Saddening (Score:5, Informative)
One of the Changes was greater transparency. (cough)
What is it with the readers on Slashdot? A couple of weeks in office and Obama has already loosened several regulations and policies pertaining to transparency, including.
1. The Ashcroft directive to automatically deny FOIA applications.
2. Made changes to the Presidential Records Act.
3. Started work on an Open Government Directive.
Also as a Senator Obama has been instrumental in legislation fostering transpaency.
http://www.propublica.org/article/obama-begins-rollback-of-bush-era-secrecy [propublica.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Funding_Accountability_and_Transparency_Act_of_2006 [wikipedia.org]
All you have done is revealed your complete lack of knowledge on the topic.
Maybe you should see a doctor for that cough.
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One of the Changes was greater transparency. (cough)
What is it with the readers on Slashdot?
This has nothing to do with people on Slashdot, this has to do with Republicans (or Democrats for that matter). No matter what happens, the opposing party will always whinge, lie, cheat, steal to try to make them look better.
Re:Saddening (Score:5, Informative)
Actually what happened here is that the UK government is concerned that the US might withdraw cooperation if the evidence makes it to court. There hasn't been word one from the US on this, let alone a statement or directive from the Prez. I'm not saying that the concern isn't legitimate, but to say that Obama has threatened to withhold intelligence is simply false.
As usual, The Economist has a good article [economist.com] on the matter.
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The Bush administration cost America something like $15 Trillion in lost equity value in just its last 4 months. On top of that it cost America something that you cannot put a value on. Respect.
Obama is going to have to work very hard to top that record of misery.
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Re:Saddening (Score:4, Interesting)
For the .01% of the people who would read it... (Score:4, Insightful)
For the .01% of the people who would actually read stuff like this, this is fantastic. It's important that the public has access to this, and a shame that no suitable politician has decided to request all the reports and publish the whole lot (is there any reason this is not the case? Contact your representatives!).
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at, and it'd already be a fulltime job to even try to read everything in a field.
Re:For the .01% of the people who would read it... (Score:5, Insightful)
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at,
Think tanks, research groups, journalists, students, historians and a whole passle of other professions will find this stuff invaluable.
They have always provided a filter between raw material and the general public. I guarantee that these reports will immediately start getting cited in journals and newspaper articles. Best of all, we can read the primary source without having to pay the RAND Corporation or some other think tank $XYZ to get our hands on the document.
Re:For the .01% of the people who would read it... (Score:4, Informative)
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at,
Think tanks, research groups, journalists, students, historians and a whole passle of other professions will find this stuff invaluable.
They have always provided a filter between raw material and the general public. I guarantee that these reports will immediately start getting cited in journals and newspaper articles. Best of all, we can read the primary source without having to pay the RAND Corporation or some other think tank $XYZ to get our hands on the document.
Most of the RAND studies commissioned by the government which are not classified are available free from their wesbite [rand.org]. Just search around or browse to the topic area that interests you.
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Certainly true. Occasionally I see references in journals to things like this [dtic.mil] - the more sources we can get like that, the better.
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I was thinking the same thing; however newsrooms are continually shrinking these days. Maybe it will take longer for this to affect coverage of national matters. But already at the state level, regional newspapers are disappearing and the bigger organizations like NYT are abandoning their news desks in places that used to get coverage. With no scrutiny, these local politicians can run amok.
Re:For the .01% of the people who would read it... (Score:5, Interesting)
The original article states that politicians are only motivated to release information that potentially helps them politically. There is very likely to be information which would be politically dangerous. e.g. information lobby groups do not want know. Anyway what's to say it wasn't a politician who gave the information to Wikileaks?
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This sounds like a job for Dennis Kucinich. Say what you want about the man but it doesn't seem possible to embarrass him.
Probably because Kucinich is so often correct. (Score:2)
Maybe it's not possible to embarrass him because he's doing so well on all the major issues of the day: opposing Iraq invasion, opposing continued Iraq occupation, instantiating impeachment, supporting universal single-payer health care, citing Arms Export and Control Act in voting against House Measure which supported Israeli offensive, being the only repeat Democratic Party peace candidate, and speaking firmly based on ethical and legal grounds the whole way through. These are unarguably international is
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I don't think I phrased myself very well. I wanted to say that he doesn't do anything that gives the lie to his public statements. That is, he doesn't say one thing and do something else as so many politicians do. He also doesn't say one thing and then later come back hemming and hawing about how a position he now holds is completely opposite what he's said in the past but it's OK because blah blah blah. It certainly helps that I agree with him on nearly everything, down to being vegan. I contributed t
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For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read
Governments could even hide information this way. They could publish tons of documents about every tiny detail, so it would be very hard to find the really interesting ones in the flood of information.
Everything would be published somewhere, but no one could find it, so effectively it would be a secret.
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No, information processing power has caught up. Anything really scary in there can be found in a month because it's just text.
Well, they could use non-obvious phrases and words in the text, they could use several different phrases for the same concept, etc. so that one couldn't simply search for a word or something.
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There's also the issue that nobody agrees on what's interesting or bad. Because Americans don't talk much about politics in public, we have these little isolated communities that believe that "if only everyone else knew what I knew they'd come over to my side" ranging the spectrum from libertarians to socialists (and also including smaller-issue matters). To some people, the notion of banks using a fractional reserve is part of a huge conspiracy, and to most people reading a fairly standard academic world a
What difference does audience size make to access? (Score:2)
Are you suggesting that the need to publish this material for wide dissemination is somehow related to the number of people who would read it; if few people are perceived to read the material there is much reduced need to publish the material?
It seems to me that this conflates how many would read this material with who deserves access to this material. These factors strike me as two independent issues. Much like software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify a computer program) being deb
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In case the tone of my post was not clear, I believe it's very important that things like this be published - we should have as much government transparency as we can (I would far rather have a transparent liberal autocracy than a secretive representative liberal democracy).
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For the .01% of the people who would actually read stuff like this, this is fantastic
that is true.
For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at, and it'd already be a fulltime job to even try to read everything in a field.
Let me help you: For the rest of us, it's a good thing that those .01% will look at those documents, and come and let us know when they find a smoking gun.
You've heard of the "many eyes" theory, right? You don't have to personally read them to benefit from their release.
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Look folks, McCain is a *politician*. There are some of them out there who genuinely have a philosophy and an agenda against which all of their decisions are measured, but they're rare. Within some bounds, they flex from side to side based on which way they think will get them elected. McCain went right, thinking that he'd attract more of the R nutjob base than if he'd move to the center.
Obama did the right thing, and came center from the left. That was enough to satisfy conservatives like myself who ca
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Even from the perspective of a socialist who wants a large government that does a lot of things, McCain is admirable for trimming things that were actually wasteful. I don't particularly like the McCain that I saw in the election (Palin terrified me, and the xenophobic crowds he was forced to play to worry me), and still think Obama's a bit better on issues I care about, but I think McCain would've made a good president and hope he stays in politics (even as he's a bit old to run for the presidency again).
If it embarrasses politicians, it should be leaked (Score:5, Insightful)
If research embarrasses all the politicians in Congress, it's even more important that it be leaked.
Why not under FOIA? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why wouldn't these reports be available under FOIA? Considering that its "nominally public domain" already, what exemption would it fall under to bar a request?
Re:Why not under FOIA? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why wouldn't these reports be available under FOIA? Considering that its "nominally public domain" already, what exemption would it fall under to bar a request?
You have to know they exist before you can file a FOIA request.
Re:Why not under FOIA? (Score:5, Informative)
Why wouldn't these reports be available under FOIA?
FTFA:
"The CRS, as a branch of Congress, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act."
Re: (Score:2)
The 'oh shi-! this is gonna fuck my career' exception of course.
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So, what's so interesting? (Score:3, Interesting)
So now that these reports are "released", how many of you, slashdot readers that post in this thread, actually read at least 1 of them in its entirety? How many read 2? 5? Hands, anyone?
I did go to the site. I read 3 reports on a topic that interests me. What I found was a dry, relatively correct, summary of public and well known information. These reports are created so that each congressman (or whoever else may need them) does not have to read every single newspaper, web site or send his staff on a search of basic statistics. The information is not obtained in ways that are inaccessible to you and me, and reports do not seem to provide any particular insight not already available to those who follow the topic (for example I found nothing of interest in these reports, everything was well known to me, because I follow this topic on my own).
There are hundreds of thousands of reports like these prepared in each large (or small) organization on variety of themes. They are not specifically released because, frankly, it is pointless to do so. While some sort of a website with these reports would be a symbol of opennes, it would likely have very little practical applicability. The only people who need these reports are those who need information on topics that they don't personally care very much about (so they don't want to do their own research) but do need for whatever reason to know what's going on. That means: :) :)
1) politicians
2) students, in particular during midterms and finals
1st group has access anyway and 2nd could benefit from doing a bit of research on their own.
Feel free to rate this flamebait.
Re:So, what's so interesting? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that you skimmed some reports, you can judge that they were harmless, and claim it's "pointless" to release them. Hindsight is 20/20, right?
I skimmed some too, and found them similarly dry, but had exactly the opposite reaction. I am upset that they have not been released earlier. $1,000,000,000 of taxpayers' money went to producing these reports. We paid for them and if they are not a matter of national security (in which case they should be classified), then we should have access to them.
If democracy is going to work, voters need as much information as possible when deciding whether or not to replace their leaders come election time. Therefore, open access to harmless material should be the rule, not the exception. Closed access should be used only when absolutely necessary. Anything else makes it too easy for bad leaders (incompetent or otherwise) to cover their tracks and maintain power undeservedly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Already have read one in its entirety while I was eating lunch, and will probably go digging around for more of interest this evening.
While I agree with the supposition that the general populous is too stupid and/or lazy to bother educating themselves, and the release will not do them any good anyway, I'd argue on the side of, "Why not make the information available anyway?" It's a pretty good way for someone to bring themselves up to speed on some of the nuances of issues without doing a lot of research.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Um, this is Slashdot. To RTFA is practically a sin, imagine how verboten it would be to read research reports?
(Actually, I'm off to see if I can find anything interesting right now. I just wanted to read the comments first.)
Re:So, what's so interesting? (Score:5, Informative)
It is not "pointless" to release such reports -- they show the results specifically of an organization's investigation into a topic. Not just a source of info about the topic but also a source of info about what the organization considered and concluded on that topic. Very important for an organization that is supposed to be accountable to the people, such as Congress. These CRS reports used to be (and should be again) released by the GPO in hardcopy. CRS lobbied against bills that would have required them to be published over the internet.
Let's start with these (Score:5, Informative)
Intellectual Property, Computer Software and the Open Source Movement, March 11, 2004 [wikileaks.org]
Telecommunications Japans Telecommunications Deregulation: NTTs Access Fees and Worldwide Expansion, August 9, 2000 [wikileaks.org]
Telecommunications Act: Competition, Innovation, and Reform, June 7, 2007 [wikileaks.org]
Patent-related The Obviousness Standard in Patent Law: KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc., May 31, 2007 [wikileaks.org]
Re: (Score:2)
One you missed..
Constitutionality of Proposals to Prohibit the Sale or Rental to Minors of Video Games with Violent or Sexual Content or "Strong Language", August 23, 2007 [wikileaks.org]
How many of these are new? (Score:2)
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I'll tell you what's going on: government documents which are intrinsically public domain are being held behind artificially constructed "pay" walls erected by private companies. It's not an uncommon practice, not only in federal government but all the way down to local city and county governments, and in the past it actually made small amounts of sense. In the pre-internet days distributing documents cost non-trivial amounts of money because physical copies had to be made. Now that the Internet has driv
Alphabetic list... (Score:2)
Since the list of names all start with CRS, the alphabetic list is thousands of reports all in the letter "C".
HA.
Too bad they did not make them easily downloadable (Score:2)
I'd like to get the fulltext and meta pages of all of these repords in pdf and txt form so I can store them locally and work on them locally (the site is often overloaded at the moment, and advanced full text search is not available). I searched for a way to do that easily. No dice. The only way, it appears, would be to hammer the server with wget and recursively download everything on there. Bad form.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's a torrent link of exactly that on wikileaks
1 billion dollars... (Score:2)
Does that refer to the bribe normally required to access these documents?
How much is that in Libraries of Congress?
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.S. government is extremely corrupt.
Human beings are extremely corrupt.
There, fixed that for ya.
Kill all humans!
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Insightful)
All governments are corrupt. From nations down to neighborhood associations.
It is the nature of some men and women to seek power over others, and because of this driving need, they are more likely to end up in government positions than other persons who might be more qualified in all kinds of ways, but who are not attracted to power. It is also true that those who are ethically unencumbered are more likely to win the races they enter than anyone who tries to follow the rules. The end result is the old adage I first heard applied to the Chicago political machine of the 1960s:
A government does not have to be good, and rarely is. It only has to be good enough that the populace will tolerate it.
The US Constitution was built with this in mind. Its system of checks and balances are designed to keep the natural corruptive nature of politics reined in by making it very difficult for any one individual or group from obtaining across the board power. I think we could now design a better system, since we know a lot more now, and we have some neat technologies that were not available back in the day. But so long as what we've got is good enough, that's not going to happen.
Wikileaks has just raised the bar by shining light into some murky corners. Back room deals and cover-ups that used to be good enough are not good enough any longer... and that's a big win for the Nation.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
It is also true that those who are ethically unencumbered are more likely to win the races they enter than anyone who tries to follow the rules.
Apparently if you smoke a little weed every now and again you can kick ass in the swimming pool.
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who desire power tend to be the least deserving of it.
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Those who desire power tend to be the least deserving of it.
Those who desire power tend to be those who can least be trusted with it.
There, fixed that for ya.
Fight the power!
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Funny)
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
old adage (Score:2, Insightful)
The end result is the old adage I first heard applied to the Chicago political machine of the 1960s: A government does not have to be good, and rarely is. It only has to be good enough that the populace will tolerate it.
An older version of the same adage:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by
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Holy carp! Our Founding Fathers were talking about OO design and refactoring even then - they really were omniscient!
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Insightful)
We should draft random people to become politicians.
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Kind of like jury duty?
"Really, I'd love to go to Washington DC and represent my area, but unfortunately I have a dentist appointment that week..."
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Both sides of this argument have debatable value.
On one hand, the everyday person is less likely to be the aforementioned power-seeking personality, and has not had to compromise or ignore better values to beat the competition. They did not have to work their way up through the political world, and, thus, they may likely have a less influenced or constricted view of solving problems. They could bring a detached logic to systems and procedures that have gotten too bogged down in themselves.
On the other hand,
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Draft a group of fifty at random, let anyone in that group who wants to drop out do so, and let people vote amongst the candidates that are left. That should at least weed out a few of the sociopaths and mentally challenged who would eventually be selected by a purely random process. Anyone who serves is taken out of the pool, as is anyone convicted of a felony.
Of course, the down side would potentially be that the power vultures would descend on the lot of them and corrupt or destroy them before we had a c
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I keep re-reading through this, but I am not getting the part where you see this as different than what we do now?
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not the worst idea in the world, actually
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, yes! Use force! Only by taking away freedom (the freedom not to be a politician) can we protect freedom!
That's my knee-jerk reaction, and it's like that for a reason--just about the only thing anyone ever proposes is more force. Forcing banks to lend money to people that wouldn't have qualified for loans under the bank's own rules, coupled with the creation (again, through force of federal law) things like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which gave institutions a place to unburden themselves of that debt, got us into the mess we have now. And the first thing people think (well, to give them credit, they did stop it the first time, but when the fear mongering set in, they caved) is "the government should do something". And when they say that, they mean "by force".
Every time you think of or hear of a possible government solution to a problem, ask yourself if this is just another scheme to try to use force to make things the way someone thinks they should be. Force is seductive--it looks so easy. End poverty! Take all the rich bastards' money and give it to the poor! Stop the horrors of drug addiction! Make drugs illegal! Prostitution is immoral! Make it illegal! Pornography {feminist: victimizes women!} {religious right:offends God!} It should be illegal!
The alternative is _so_ _much_ _more_ _work_! It staggers the mind to think of what it would take to teach, encourage, get people to choose to do the thing you think is right. Some of them might not ever do it. It would be _so_ _much_ _easier_ to just _make_ them! And that, basically, is what you get from the left and the right. A plan to force others to do things they way they think they should be done.
The thing is, the people that are in positions of power aren't the problem. It's the power that we have conceded to them. The constitution does not give the government the right to do 1/3rd (made that up, I bet it's actually smaller) of what it does. What we should do is work to reign government back to what the constitution says it is. Then you can fret less about who gets elected, because they will have less power to mess up your life.
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Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Insightful)
Corruption is a fairly common attribute of government. Regardless of when and where in human history you look... Power can both corrupt and attract the corrupt/easily corruptable. What's actually more worrying is when people display such great faith that "their government" is immune to or free of corruption.
Re:The U.S. government is extremely corrupt. (Score:5, Informative)
The documents are actually reassuring because they state that people are aware that things are wrong. Among the few I briefly scanned are paraphrased thusly: "Oil companies are fixing prices and US law should render oil cartels illegal", "CEO's make way too much damn money, even as their companies are being run into the ground", etc.
Again, the documents are basically admissions that our country is fucked up. Disclaimer: I haven't scanned all of them, and I hope that the discussion turns up interesting facts.
I'd go further (Score:5, Informative)
Having looked through some as well, I'd take it a step further.
I don't think there's anything secret in there at ALL.
It's just simple, journalistic-style research and analysis, with information entirely from public sources.
I don't think you're going to find any buried scandals here. At all. You'd probably get more from reading a
good selection of newspapers. Journalists tend to have inside sources, after all.
The worst I could imagine from what I've seen is stuff like "Congressman so-and-so said he didn't know about X..
but he should have if he'd read Congress' own report on it!"
not secret at all (Score:2)
This isn't secret information at all; these are reports that are constantly published by the US Government. I think they used to be put in public libraries; I remember researching CRS reports at university libraries in the 80s. Putting them online is something the government should be doing, not Wikileaks, but either way, nobody is going to get in trouble for this, and nobody is going to find any state secrets here.
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This is far from secret information, but is a great thing to read when you need background information on policy matters. Also gives an idea what legislators are looking at when they have to vote on items they have no clue about.
Kudos to the guys who wrote this stuff up
available for cost from penny hill (Score:5, Insightful)
What's more, these documents were apparently already available for a fee from this company [pennyhill.com]. All they're doing is (rightly, imho) making them available for free rather than forcing people to pay a publishing company for access to records that we supposedly already own.
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More than 1,000,000 people have been killed in Iraq [opinion.co.uk] at a final cost of at least $3,000,000,000,000 [washingtonpost.com].
Really? Cause last I heard, they pretty much just made that shit up [go.com].
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Yes really, your own link provides no clear evidence either way. Sounds about right to me.
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Ya.. maybe you should have voted for McCain.. the same guy that said on during his nomination acceptance speech that he would vote against any bill that was filled with pork.
No he didn't. Presidents don't vote.
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Nothing would have stopped them from requesting every single one of these and releasing them all to the public. Actions speak louder than bills.
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*sigh*
Of course, always blame it on 1984..
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Occupational hazard of a free society. I'll deal with it.
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Yes [thepiratebay.org] (more info [thepiratebay.org])