CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE: More on Vanishing Records on the Web:
thememoryhole.org
Over 300 Congressional Research Service Reports That Were Pulled from the Web
>>> The Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, provides fact-rich, unbiased, nontechnical reports to members of Congress regarding a variety of issues. The CRS does not distribute these reports to the public in any way. You can't get them online, order paper copies from the CRS, or even read them in the Library of Congress. CRS is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The Service's philosophy is that it works for Congress, not the people, so its publications are deliberately made difficult to get.
A few exceptions exist. Some third parties get selected reports through Congressional representatives, then post them online. The State Department's Website contains CRS reports that State prepared. Penny Hill Press provides all CRS reports, but you have to cough up $29.95 for each report if you're not a subscriber ($7.95 is you are a $299-per-year subscriber).
For a while, the Websites of Congressmen Mark Green and Christopher Shays provided a gateway to a CRS internal database, giving us access to a large but still incomplete selection of these reports. (Frustratingly, the CRS database blocked search engines, meaning that the reports never showed up in searches and weren't cached by Google or Gigablast.)
In mid-October, Green and Shays suddenly shut off access. Since theirs were the only doors into the CRS database, all of us lost access to this rich source of information. Luckily, The Memory Hole had copied many of these reports before the curtain came down. Below you will find the four main pages from Green's portal to the CRS database. If The Memory Hole has a copy of any given report, the link "MemHole mirror" appears after the title. We're interested in filling the gaps, so if you have a report that's listed but not mirrored, please send it. And we're especially interested in receiving CRS reports that don't appear anywhere else online.
For more info on access issues surrounding CRS publications, read "Congressional Research Service Products: Taxpayers Should Have Easy Access" from the Project on Government Oversight.
pogo.org
Mirrored CRS lists and reports at The Memory Hole
Long Reports
thememoryhole.org
Short Reports
thememoryhole.org
Issue Briefs
thememoryhole.org
Appropriations Reports
thememoryhole.org
Other Sources of CRS Reports
Intelligence and Related Issues [Federation of American Scientists]
Nuclear, Chemical and Missile Weapons and Proliferation [FAS]
Military and National Security [FAS]
Environmental Policy [National Library for the Environment]
Foreign Relations and Related Issues [State Department]
Penny Hill Press
Thanks to Steven Aftergood of FAS and Secrecy News |
