The following is an excellent article about the failure of Congress to put
its most important documents on the Internet.  The 508 regulations that
will require government web sites to be accessible may not provide full
access to the mountains of information swirling around Washington and
available only in print.  Our next access challenge is supporting the move
from printed materials to electronic documents.  As the article suggests,
many in congress feel that such a move would threaten power structures and
bring heightened scrutiny to representatives and senators.  The article is
from the November issue of Wired Magazine.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/govdocs.html

Filegate.gov: The biggest Congressional scandal of the digital age:
Politicians aren't putting public docs on the Net, and no one seems to
care.
By David Corn

A political consultant walks into a bar in Washington, DC, and notices
that the TV is playing a closed-captioned news broadcast. In one of
those moments that give DC its wonkish tang, he has an inspiration: Why
not use technology to make Congress more accessible to the public?

So, in April 1999, Philip Angell, then head of corporate communications
for Monsanto, started thinking about congressional hearings - the
year-round pageant of experts, lawyers, government officials, lobbyists,
academics, and miscellaneous citizen-advocates who testify before House
and Senate committees. Although some hearings are empty exercises in
showboating, the bulk are noteworthy, particularly those that involve
pending legislation, appropriations, nominations, and oversight of
government agencies. Angell knew it was often difficult to attend the
hearings that matter: The committee rooms are not large; most
congressional leaders couldn't care less about making life easier for
spectators; and flocks of lobbyists and reporters descend upon the
meatiest sessions, sometimes paying line-standers to reserve spots.
C-Span airs a limited number of hearings - some live, some after the
fact. And, upholding bureaucratic tradition, the committees and
subcommittees themselves don't release printed transcripts for many
months. Even though most hearings are officially "public," it's not easy
for citizens to tap in. Surely, Angell thought, technology could open
some doors.

He was right. This June, Angell launched HearingRoom.com
(www.hearingroom.com), a Web site that uses voice recognition technology
to deliver real-time streaming text and audio of congressional hearings.
In the 14 months since his brainstorm, he accomplished what Congress has
not even bothered to try. But Angell is a businessman, not a public
policy do-gooder; he intends to make a buck. In fact, he's estimating
revenue of $3 million in the first year alone. A subscription to his
service costs $1,000 to $15,000 a year - hardly a for-the-people price.
Naturally, his first two dozen customers are lobbyists, corporations,
and media organizations. The average political junkie is still locked
out.

Angell's venture underscores a profound failure of Congress. Why is it
that the powers that be on Capitol Hill - the people who write our laws
and who make up what is supposed to be the federal government's most
accessible arm - have not enthusiastically embraced the Internet and put
their day-to-day work online? Angell created a relatively simple
operation using off-the-shelf tools and a modest budget. He drew on
existing voice-rec technology - Lernout & Hauspie's Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Professional software. He raised about $850,000 in
seed money - a tiny sum compared with congressional appropriations. And
he easily obtained permission to wire Senate and House committee rooms
with audio feed lines. None of this was beyond Congress' means, but all
of it was light-years beyond its imagination.

Newt Gingrich vowed to unlock "the entire flow of information," for
free. Six years later, it's yours - for $1,000 to $15,000 a year.

"Congress could do this if it wanted, and there is nothing standing in
the way," says Angell, who could be put out of business tomorrow if
legislators flip the right switches. But that is unlikely to happen,
despite the fact that Congress promised to get wired six years ago.

Days after the Republicans snatched control of the House of
Representatives in 1994, Newt Gingrich, the speaker-to-be, declared he
would push Congress into the information age. Gingrich saw himself as a
revolutionary poised to remake the government and renew American
society. He pledged to create a system that would allow the entire
country to have electronic access to congressional documents. With
typically melodramatic flair, he promised to change "the entire flow of
information and the entire quality of knowledge in the country."

There was certainly room for improvement on the Hill. At the time, only
a few congressional documents - such as the daily Congressional Record
and the original text of selected bills - were available online.
Gingrich knew that Congress could do much more. Announcing that he would
recruit futurist Alvin Toffler and various high tech firms, he vowed
that "we will change the rules of the House to require that all
documents ...be filed electronically ... so that information is
available to every citizen in the country at the same moment it is
available to the highest-paid Washington lobbyist." It was a fresh and
forward-looking plan.

Unfortunately, it didn't go very far. Lobbyists still have better access
than any plugged-in commoner. Members of Congress, who in '94 were
amazingly un-wired as a group, have learned to make use of the Net, but
mostly in the interest of campaigning, managing PR, or scoring partisan
political points. Everyone remembers how quickly the House Judiciary
Committee posted Kenneth Starr's salacious report on the Monica Lewinsky
mess and other impeachment-related documents, many of which embarrassed
Bill Clinton. And every member of Congress now has a self-glorifying Web
site. Even so, much of Congress' basic work cannot be accessed on the
Net. And these days, there is little rah-rah talk on the Hill about
changing that.

For several years, public-access advocates have been grumbling about
this unfulfilled promise. Leading the pack is Gary Ruskin, the
35-year-old director of the Congressional Accountability Project, an
organization founded by Ralph Nader. Sitting in his dark Dupont Circle
office beneath soot-stained windows and tall, unsteady stacks of old
newspapers and books, Ruskin ticks off a list of vital information that
Congress has failed to post on the Web. A top item: working drafts of
legislation, the new versions of bills that emerge as they crawl through
subcommittees and committees. You won't find these updates posted on
Thomas, the main congressional Web site (thomas.loc.gov). This material
is often available in hard copy to the lobbyists who prowl the halls of
Congress. But these working versions are rarely obtainable in electronic
form. No committee chair has made this a priority, so if you're unable
to visit Capitol Hill and find a cooperative aide, you're out of luck.

"I have yet to meet a member of Congress who supports placing this stuff
online," Ruskin says. "There are reasons members might want to keep
bills secret or quiet sometimes. They can hope things like favors done
for contributors or boondoggles or waste are not discovered easily. But
there's a basic question here: How can citizens be expected to petition
their Congress knowledgeably without access to the relevant legislative
documents?"

Thomas lacks mountains of other useful information, including
Congressional Research Service reports, which are not routinely posted.
The CRS, a nonpartisan, highly regarded research outfit housed in the
Library of Congress, has published roughly 3,000 studies on a variety of
subjects - tritium production, mastectomies, food safety, leaking
underground storage tanks, global warming, and the Internet, to name a
few. You can obtain a copy of an individual CRS report by submitting a
written request to a congressional office - a cumbersome process - or
you can buy one from a commercial service that collects this material.
All of these reports could be placed online easily and affordably.
Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader from South Dakota, for
instance, has posted several hundred CRS reports on his Web site. The
CRS reports are also available at a Congress-only intranet. But this
site isn't open to the public, and Congress and the CRS have resisted
calls to open it up.

Congress also hasn't established a searchable database of votes. On the
Thomas site, it's nearly impossible to find a lawmaker's voting record
on a given issue unless you know the roll-call numbers of the relevant
votes. Nor does the site list committee and subcommittee votes. (Often
the most important votes occur in committee, not on the House or Senate
floor.) "You can get a senator's favorite recipe on his Web site, but
you can't search how he voted," Ruskin says. "None of this is rocket
science. A perfectly competent 12-year-old could write this database."

Congress also fails to post the financial disclosure statements of its
members. These annual forms, which contain details about personal
financial holdings, are available for inspection at the
public information offices of the House and Senate. The Center for
Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.com), a public interest group based
in Washington, scans and posts the records, but these usually don't
appear until weeks after they are filed. (See "By the People, For the
People," page 232.)

"You can get a senator's favorite recipe on his Web site," says
public-access advocate Gary Ruskin. "But you can't search how he voted."

Several times a year, lobbyists are required to register with Congress
and reveal what legislation they're attempting to influence. Congress
doesn't post these reports either, which is too bad: They show how
highpowered interests are working to shape laws. CRP inputs this
information and posts it, but again months go by before it becomes
available. Other basic documents, such as gift disclosures and expense
reports, can be read on paper if you visit or contact the appropriate
congressional office, but you won't find them online.

"Why shouldn't Congress post the material as it comes in?" asks Larry
Makinson, executive director of the CRP. "There's an institutional
inertia that is breathtaking to behold."

Public interest groups are pressuring politicians to release information
electronically in a timely manner. Two years ago, the DC-based groups
Center for Democracy and Technology and OMB Watch issued a 10 Most
Wanted list of government documents that should be on the Web but
aren't. The list targeted several congressional items - CRS reports,
hearing transcripts, and a searchable database of votes.

Librarians and researchers are also pressing for more e-access. "Hearing
transcripts, which include prepared testimony and various attachments,
are one of the most heavily used federal documents," says Lynne Bradley,
director of the office of government relations at the American Library
Association in DC. "It's outrageous they're not all electronically
available."

Few in Congress share the outrage. John McCain, the Arizona Republican,
and Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, have introduced bipartisan
legislation that would place CRS reports online and compel the Senate to
post lobbyist records and senators' travel and expense records. A broad
coalition supported the bill when it was put in the hopper in February
1999, including Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, the National Association of Manufacturers, IBM,
America Online, Netscape, and Intel. But the legislation has stalled in
the Senate Rules Committee. "It just sits there," says McCain.

In the House, Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut, and
David Price, a Democrat from North Carolina, have introduced legislation
to post CRS reports. This measure too is going nowhere fast.

Congress is not the only government body slow to adapt to the Net. The
10 Most Wanted list also included the State Department's daily briefing
book, the EPA's pesticide safety database, legal briefs from the Justice
Department, and the opinions of federal district and appeals courts.
(Most appeals courts make opinions available electronically, though not
always on their own Web sites. Most federal district courts do not.
Federal law requires courts to make opinions publicly available, but it
does not dictate the means by which they do so. In other words, paper is
fine.) Three of the items from the 1998 list have become electronically
available in the past two years: Supreme Court decisions; PTO Today, the
official gazette of the US Patent and Trademark Office; and the
Department of Interior's endangered-species recovery plans. The stuffy,
tradition-bound Supreme Court unveiled a Web site in April. (The Supreme
Court of Mongolia had a site up before the US Supreme Court.) In another
case of judicial inertia, the Committee on Financial Disclosures - which
manages the federal courts - last year tried to block the Web site
APBnews.com from posting the financial disclosure reports filed by all
1,600 federal judges, claiming this would violate the privacy of judges
and create security risks for the bench-tenders. These are public
documents, so it should have been a no-brainer, but APBnews endured
several months of legal wrangling before it won the fight.

Not all the news is bad: A few of the 20,000-plus government Web sites
have made real progress in capturing the potential of IT, and the
Clinton administration came on strong in its waning months. Ari
Schwartz, a policy analyst for CDT, applauds the EPA for posting its
Toxics Release Inventory database (www.epa.gov/tri), which visitors can
use to determine whether toxic chemicals are being used, transported, or
released in their area. He also commends the State Department for
quickly putting up the transcripts and audio feeds of its daily
briefings (secretary.state.gov/www/briefings), which are carefully read
around the world by journalists, government officials, and others who
monitor every hiccup in US foreign policy. The House Science Committee
and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
occasionally webcast their hearings, and other congressional committees
seem ready to follow suit. The Federal Elections Commission maintains an
easy-to-use site (www.fec.gov) that supplies extensive information on
where politicians get their campaign funds.

On the 2000 campaign trail, Al Gore talked about doing a lot more,
calling for the creation of a new "e-government" that would place nearly
every federal government service online by 2003. Gore noted that
citizens should be able to check their Social Security benefits, look up
the status of a student loan, and investigate the purity of their local
drinking water on the Net. Gore's running mate, Joseph Lieberman, a
Democrat from Connecticut, and Fred Thompson, a Republican from
Tennessee, have pushed a similar e-government initiative in the Senate.

Earlier this year, the Clinton White House spent $600,000 over seven
months to redesign its Web site (www.whitehouse.gov). The site allows
citizens to obtain much of the material (speeches, press briefings,
reports, fact sheets) that the White House churns out. It also lets you
reserve a campsite in a national forest, file a consumer fraud
complaint, review crash results for new automobiles, and apply for
financial aid for college. When the redesign was made public, President
Clinton announced that a team led by Eric Brewer - cofounder and chief
scientist at Inktomi - was busy creating a one-stop site
(www.firstgov.gov) for searching all of the federal government documents
available online. The impressive goal, which is supposed to be reached
sometime this fall, is a site that could handle at least 100 million
daily searches, looking through half a billion documents in less than
one-quarter of a second.

None of these changes will necessarily compel congressional slowpokes to
get with the program. Not to mention the fact that if Congress doesn't
digitize its own information, its documents will remain beyond the reach
of any one-stop government site. FirstGov, the elections commission's
site, and the proposals for e-government vividly demonstrate that
Congress lags far behind the other branches of government. These efforts
underscore that the obstacles to an e-Congress are not technical ones.
They are not cost-driven. It's a matter of will, which is precisely what
Congress seems to lack.

The obstacles are not price-driven, or technical. FirstGov promises to
search half a billion documents in less than a quarter of a second.

After Gingrich sounded off in 1994, he assigned the task of Netifying
Congress to Republican representatives Bill Thomas, the incoming chair
of the House Oversight Committee from California, and Vernon Ehlers, a
physicist who helped get the Michigan legislature online when he served
there in the '80s and early '90s. Ehlers moved quickly. By the time
Gingrich assumed the speakership in early 1995, Ehlers saw to it that
all new bills, committee reports related to these bills, scheduling
information, and the US Code (the massive compendium of federal laws)
were obtainable free online. Ehlers also oversaw a two-year project to
centralize and modernize the House computer system. At the same time,
the Library of Congress continued to develop Thomas as a
consumer-oriented gateway to the House and Senate computer systems.
"Never before in history has the public had such opportunity to be
knowledgeable about public officials," Ehlers boasts now.

Gingrich, too, is proud of his effort to computerize Congress, though he
concedes it did not proceed as far as it could have. "We moved a fair
distance," he says, "but then got bogged down in the act of governing."
So how much longer before everything printed is also available online?
Don't hold your breath, he counsels. Gingrich believes Congress needs a
high-powered task force to fully prod the body into the information age,
and that will take some young members making a fuss. Yet the former
Speaker still revs up quickly, envisioning a "congressional information
service" that brings all the "real-time activities and archived
activities" into people's homes via the Internet. "It could be the most
profound change since Jefferson sold his library to Congress," he says.
"Yet nobody is building that sort of architecture. And no one is
introducing legislation to make it happen."

Ehlers gets defensive when challenged on this front. "We've put millions
of pages up," he says. "Those complaining are not giving an accurate
view of what is available proportionately." How about working drafts of
legislation? "Well, that's a tough problem," he says. "I don't know if
it's of any comfort to the public, but frequently we don't have written
copies of bills. Most bills go through constant change and are kept in a
staffer's desk until the final session." (To this, the Congressional
Accountability Project's Ruskin counters that lobbyists on the Hill
often are able to find printed versions of bills as the legislation
proceeds.) As for committee hearings, Ehlers says that it's the
committee chairs who determine what happens to the transcripts.
"Chairmen can decide whether or not to devote staff" to digitizing and
posting transcripts, he says. They rarely do.

Lobbyist disclosure reports? "I know of no policy that would prevent
their posting," Ehlers says. True, but there's no policy that leads to
their posting, either. CRS reports? Some are, Ehlers asserts, the
property of the senators and representatives who order them. It's up to
these lawmakers to decide whether they should be released. So automatic
posting of those is out of the question. (Ehlers, though, has proposed a
compromise that would result in a limited number of CRS reports being
made electronically available.)

And what about a searchable database of voting records? "Sure, there
could be such a thing. But it's a question of resources. As one of our
members put it to me, the problem is that the media is lazy and wants us
to do their work for them. To what extent do we have a responsibility to
collate information and do databases, when we provide the raw data? It
would be a lot of work to organize. So many votes are hard to explain."

The two committees responsible for managing Congress - the House
Committee on Administration and the Senate Rules and Administration
Committee - share this attitude. Asked whether Congress is lagging,
Jason Poblete, the press secretary of the House committee, blasts the
detractors: "There are constant critics of the House, and they can find
stuff to criticize, but they take no note that half the stuff online was
not online four years ago." Confronted with specifics about the
still-sizable gaps, Poblete concedes that not all committees have moved
to post hearing transcripts and working drafts of legislation. "We will
look into that at some point," he says.

Tamara Somerville, staff director of the Senate Rules committee, also
quickly shifts the blame to committee chairs: "The committees all
operate separately. I don't know what they're doing." In other words,
the rules committee is not concerned with the lack of action. In a plea
for sympathy, Somerville notes that Congress has trouble competing with
the private sector when it comes to finding and retaining computer
specialists. "It took us one year to hire an information technology
person for our own committee Web page," she says with a sigh. Regarding
the posting of lobbyist reports, Somerville says, "I can't recall that
ever being discussed. We deal with so much every day. We're just so
busy." Clearly, making Congress as compatible as possible with the
Internet is not at the top of anyone's to-do list. It's barely a topic
of conversation.

The Gingrich promise has been broken. What could be behind the general
reluctance of Congress to place all of its public material within
keyboard reach of citizens across the country? Could it be that members
of Congress want to control information about themselves and don't want
to be scrutinized?

"Exactly!" Senator McCain confirms. "All the information we have about
what we do should be on the Web. I don't understand the opposition
entirely myself. Part of it is an institutional bias. Part is
business-as-usual thinking. I have a few allies, but most senators don't
pay a lot of attention to this."

Could it be that members of Congress want to control information about
themselves and don't want to be scrutinized? "Exactly!" says McCain.

Ultimately, the reason for Congress' slow walk is not difficult to
fathom: The people running the place are not visionaries looking to
change the power dynamic between politicians and citizens. As Larry
Makinson of the Center for Responsive Politics says, "Newt wanted to put
everything up on the Web, except what would inconvenience members of
Congress."

Congress should use the Internet, Ruskin argues, to "allow citizens to
impact bills while they are in process." Yet Congress is not eager to
arm the people with digital information. "It's low on people's radar
screens," says a congressional aide sympathetic to the critics. "Talking
about government documents and the Internet doesn't grab headlines like
saving Social Security or going to war against Serbia. Few people here
care a lot about this."

Arguably, it is Congress' responsibility to exploit technological
advances that boost citizen involvement in lawmaking and strengthen the
bond between those who govern and those who are governed. But this
congressional aide states a sad fact: "Unless there is a lot of public
interest, there will not be any momentum to move things along."

True, there may not be a widespread popular clamor for an e-Congress.
But there was no mass movement for television access to Congress before
C-Span began broadcasting congressional proceedings in 1979. Now, C-Span
is considered an essential component of the media-age democracy.

A commercial interest may be the driving force of an Net-accessible
Congress. And HearingRoom.com's Philip Angell plans to expand his
service to cover executive branch hearings, such as those conducted by
the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission,
and the National Transportation Safety Board. Nonetheless, these
agencies should post free digital versions of the hearings themselves,
he says. Angell proudly notes that his dotcom, for a price, can "provide
contemporaneous access to people all across the country - in thousands
of cities, state and local governments, colleges, law schools, and
libraries - to all who have an interest in Washington."

Angell figured out how the Internet could bridge the gap between
Congress and the rest of us. It's shameful that none of the leaders of
Congress are thinking about how to put him out of business.


David Corn ([log in to unmask]) is Washington editor of The Nation and author
of the novel Deep Background.


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html