For Immediate Release:
January 24, 2006
For information, contact:
David McGuire
(202) 637-9800 x106
(202) 423-7432 (cell)
Less than a year after the Center for Democracy & Technology made Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports freely available to the public, members of the Internet community have responded by downloading more than 1 million of the informative documents from http://www.OpenCRS.com .
Funded by taxpayers at roughly $100 million annually, the Congressional Research Service acts as a private think tank for Congress, producing detailed research reports on a range of issues. Although those documents are not classified, for many years they remained difficult to obtain for ordinary citizens. In June, CDT launched OpenCRS, which drew together several public collections of CRS reports and encouraged members of the public to submit new reports as they became available. This week, visitors to the popular site downloaded the millionth report since its launch.
"This site is a textbook illustration of the power the Internet has to make the government accessible to the people," CDT Executive Director Leslie Harris said. "That visitors to the site have downloaded more than a million reports in just over six months, makes it clear that the public is hungry for this sort of information."
Prior to launching OpenCRS, CDT argued for many years that the government should make all CRS reports available to the public as soon as they are published. Although OpenCRS.com offers the public free access to nearly 10,000 reports, many of the documents still remain inaccessible to ordinary citizens. CDT continues to call for legislation that would make all of the reports available to the public.