The battle has escalated, folks. More time, effort and, presumably, taxpayer dollars are being expended in the ongoing battle to keep CRS reports out of the hands of those who pay for them — e.g., us. Effective immediately, some bureaucrat higher up the CRS food chain must approve your request for a CRS document if you are one of the Great Unwashed.

Said CRS Director Daniel P. Mulholland, in a memo (PDF; 132 KB) dated 20 March 2007, “(T)o avoid inconsistencies and to increase accountability, CRS policy requires prior approval at the division level before products can be disseminated to non-congressionals.”

More details are available in this post over at DocuTicker, our sister site. We learned about the Mulholland memo from this post by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, on his Secrecy News weblog. Said Aftergood, director of the FAS Project on Government Secrecy:

While other parts of government strive to eliminate unnecessary obstacles to information sharing, the new CRS policy may be seen as an experiment in what happens when barriers to information sharing are arbitrarily increased. It probably won’t be good.

We couldn’t agree more.

And we continue to post every CRS report we see on DocuTicker, because we think you should see them, too. This link will take you to all of our CRS report roundup postings.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 12:03 am and is filed under Access to Information, Government Documents and Political Information, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.