[Infowarrior] - GAO sells legislative history archive to Thomson

[Richard Forno]

General Accounting Office has sold exclusive access to legislative history
down the river to Thomson West

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/14/general-accounting-o.html


    Readers may remember a previous Boing Boing post Did the US gov't sell
exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson West? Well, the
answer is now a definitive yes, that data has been sold down the river and
is out to sea.

    Public.Resource.Org sent in a FOIA request to GAO on this topic seeking
access to the scanned data. Today's letter answering our FOIA request spells
out the bad news. Turns out the GAO doesn't even get the data, they simply
are given an account on Thomson's service. The rest of the government
doesn't get access to this data, and the public is invited to stop by the
GAO headquarters and pay 20 cents per page to copy paper.

    This is one of those deals where the public domain got sold off ... GAO
gets a bit of convenience by having their stuff scanned for them, but they
gave up way more than they got in the deal, and the public (including
government workers and public interest groups who need to consult this data)
lost big-time. 

Link to the Scribd group with the full paper trail on this issue, Link to
the today's letter (Thanks, Carl!)