Watchdogs fight secrecy with database

9 Nov 2007 // Look out all you government bureaucrats who deny or delay Freedom of Information Act requests.

Here comes Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a coalition of other Washington watchdogs with a new database of FOIA documents that citizens can access.

In short, they are bypassing government to bring the documents to the people.

And the best part of it? There are no formal FOIA letters to write, no follow-up demands citing the public’s right to know, no costly court battles to get the government documents stored in this repository.

There is simply a compuer database filled with documents, 36,000 at launch and growing each day, for the public to search and use at it wants.

There is lots of “good stuff ” on the database already: Hurricane Katrina; global warming; Neil Bush; Jack Abramoff; secret service records.

The documents were obtained by CREW, Project on Government Oversight, Public Citizen, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation—groups that are committed to government transparency and exposing corruption in Washington.

“There are no other databases out there like this—this is a true collaboration among all these groups,” said Naomi Seligman, deputy director of CREW. “We hope it will become a community project.”

In the past, the watchdog groups have posted documents on their websites but they have been unsearchable PDFs or they have highlighted several pages to bolster a findings.

This limits the public’s access and minimizes the opportunities for use by researchers, journalists and citizen reviewers for further research and disclosures, Seligman said.

“Sunlight is proud to have funded CREW’s government docs site,” said Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, which supported the creation of the site as part of its mission to use technology to bring more transparency to government.

“The innovative tool they have developed is pioneering in its use of Web 2.0 technology to give citizens the power to review once obscure FOIA documents,” Miller said.