Of, by, and for the People
An unprecedented amount of government data is available at your fingertips.
by David R. NoackWith the nation's business being conducted
in the District of Columbia--that federal enclave between Maryland and
Virginia--obviously most of the electorate is spread far and wide. How
can a voter in Oregon, Maine, or New Mexico
keep tabs on lawmakers and the swirl of issues in the nation's capital?
It's becoming increasingly easier to keep in touch with official Washington
thanks to the Internet. Whatever your political
leaning, allegiance, opinion, affiliation, or interest, you'll find it
online.
The amount of federal government information
on the Net is overwhelming. In fact, the global network of networks is
fast becoming the de facto standard for releasing all kinds of government
information. Find out how much your lawmaker received in campaign contributions
from a particular industry or lobbying group via Project
Vote Smart, and even read a sampling of one of the latest stories about
the workings of Congress from Congressional Quarterly magazine.
There are about three dozen Usenet political
and government newsgroups, along with an increasing number of Gopher, telnet,
and FTP sites, mailing lists, and an ever-growing list of World-Wide Web
pages. Many lawmakers now have e-mail addresses, and a growing number have
Web pages, offering everything from press releases to party pronouncements
and policy statements (see Vote
for Me).
With so much government and congressional
information available, a good place to start is at the Library of Congress.
Often referred to as the LOC, it is a vast repository and gateway to all
sorts of federal facts, figures, speeches, reports, news releases, and
other documents.
Among the LOC's most comprehensive service's
is THOMAS, a project of House Speaker
Newt Gingrich named for former President Thomas Jefferson (see Newt's
Net). THOMAS provides, among other things, information on bills in
Congress (current and last year's), including their full text, supporters,
and status; access to the Congressional Record; and a primer as
to how a bill becomes a law. Additional information slated to be added
includes bill digest files, which will offer a summary and chronology of
legislation that will be integrated with the full text of legislation.
Another key site for volumes of federal
information is the Library of Congress Information System (LOCIS), which
can be accessed by telnetting to locis.loc.gov. It provides the
Library of Congress card catalog, abstracts about foreign laws, and Congressional
bill tracking dating back to 1973. LOCIS is geared toward bibliographic
and information retrieval and supports advanced search techniques for a
variety of records. The bulk of the information is in abstract or shortened
form, rather than full text.
A more recent service provided by the
LOC is Marvel, which provides Congressional
and other government information via Gopher. Under the Government Information
listing, you can select Congressional Gophers, which provide quick connections
to the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The House of Representatives menu offers
a quick civics lesson on the role that Congress plays as one of the three
branches of the federal government. There are also listings of House committees,
directories, e-mail addresses, press releases, and constituent information.
And there are menus for Democratic and Republican leadership, where you
can read daily floor speeches and press releases from each party's leaders.
The House
also has a site on the Web. It includes the status of bills and amendments
(posted the same day they are introduced), an up-to-the-hour summary of
current House debate, schedules, directories, the Congressional Record,
full text of bills, and a lot more.
On the other side of the Capitol, so
to speak, the Senate Gopher houses
information about its members and activities. Here you can access press
releases, committee reports, and other legislative information and data.
You also can find information about constituent services that Senators
provide, who to write when you have a problem, and press releases and position
papers.
The Senate
FTP site contains congressional committee reports and policy statements,
along with Democratic and Republican Policy positions on various issues.
Under /Dem-Policy, for example,
are a number of position papers regarding the recent debate over health
care.
Another useful source of federal government
news and information is from the Government Printing Office (GPO), available
through Columbia Online Information Network (COIN) in Columbia, Missouri.
Telnet to bigcat.missouri.edu and log in as guest. At the
main menu, choose the Government Center and then United States
of America. The first item on the next menu should be GPO Access.
The GPO houses all published versions of bills, beginning with legislation
proposed in the recently completed 103rd Congress, and databases of the
Congressional Record and the Federal Register.
The GPO uses a WAIS search engine to
plow through the volumes of documents and floor speeches. For example,
by going to the Congressional Record server, you simply type in a keyword,
and any speeches or other documents entered into the Congressional Record
that contain that word will appear in full text.
For everything you want to know about
the proposed U.S. National Information Infrastructure (NII; otherwise known
as the Information Superhighway), the NII
Virtual Library is on the Web.
If counting heads is your game, the Census
Bureau is also on the Web. The site includes up-to-the-minute population
estimates for the United States and the world, and there is a fairly flexible
way to search its various databases.
If you prefer counting money, information
about the U.S. 1996 Federal budget is available in a number of forms through
STAT-USA's Internet service. You can access it via FTP,
Gopher,
and on the Web.
The first Senator to take advantage of
the hyperlink capability of the World-Wide Web was Edward Kennedy (see
Vote for Me),
and others have followed.
There's also plenty of executive branch
government information on the Internet. The Clinton
White House's main Web page, which debuted last October, has been accessed
more than 1.25 million times, and some 18 million files have been downloaded,
which include everything from pictures of artwork to the proposed 1996
Federal budget.
The White House also has created "An
Interactive Citizens Handbook," a Web page that contains press releases,
speeches, and the full question-and-answer text of press conferences. There's
also a few audio clips, including one from Socks, the first cat. The site
can be accessed via the White House home page.
Vice President Al Gore has set up a Web
home page to promote his National Performance
Review (NPR), which is an attempt to downsize the federal government
and make it operate more efficiently. There are more than 500 documents
dealing with various efforts to streamline the government.
If your interest is in the federal judiciary,
you can obtain the latest Supreme Court decisions from Project
Hermes via FTP. Project Hermes was started in May 1990 by the U.S.
Supreme Court as an experiment to see whether court opinions could be distributed
electronically. In 1993, following a trial period, the court decided to
officially endorse this method of dissemination. The opinions and decisions
are housed at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
In addition to Web and government Gopher
sites, there is plenty of political debate and discussion
taking place in Usenet newsgroups, such as talk.politics.misc,
alt.news-media, alt.politics.usa, alt.politics.reform,
and alt.politics.democrats. Be warned that discussions of
partisan issues can become heated.
The major newsgroup for general political
discussion is soc.politics, although there are more than
a dozen groups under the alt.politics heading. The alt groups
tend to be more specific, covering issues (alt.politics.datahighway,
alt.politics.drinking-age), people (alt.politics.clinton,
alt.politics.bush), and other political topics
(alt.politics.usa.constitution, alt.politics.libertarian).
And for those who prefer ongoing discussion that don't necessarily lead
anywhere, there's the talk.politics.* groups.
An extremely useful source of financial
information is EDGAR, a searchable database of Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC) filings. The quickest and most painless way to get at
this corporate financial information is by gophering to town.hall.org.
Another popular source of government
information--and much more--is FedWorld,
an online information service of the National Technical Information Service,
which is part of Department of Commerce. It can be accessed by telneting
to fedworld.gov or by FTP.
FedWorld also provides access to more than 130 government bulletin boards.
You can obtain general consumer information, State Department travel advisories,
White House information, and AIDS information from the Department of Health
and Human Services.
Besides government-operated Internet
sites, there are many good government, civic, academic, business, and nonprofit
groups that provide information on the federal government, agencies, and
departments. A large collection of listings of government agencies on the
Net can be found on the World-Wide
Web Virtual Library, in the U.S. Government Agencies section.
For political and government
junkies, the American Politics
Gopher at Northwestern University is a highly recommended resource.
It has menu listings for elections, campaigns and speeches, political
documents, images and U.S. government publications, political
parties, and much more.
For example, under Elections, Campaigns
and Speeches are submenus to a number of sites that allow you to check
up on candidates' sometimes vague campaign promises. There's also a U.S.
Speeches and Addresses menu in which you can obtain presidential inauguration
speeches of John Adams, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and other former residents
of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
C-SPAN, the public affairs cable television
network, provides a variety of programming, education, and historical material
on Washington and how government operates. C-SPAN's
site can be reached via Gopher.
Project Vote Smart provides voting records,
biographical information, performance evaluations by 70 liberal to conservative
organizations, addresses, phone numbers, and committee assignments on incumbents
and challengers.
For history buffs, there's an FTP site
that houses a collection of famous documents and speeches. Part of Project
Gutenberg, its files include George Washington's Farewell Address,
the Mayflower Compact, the Gettysburg Address, the Magna Carta, the Northwest
Ordinance, and more than two dozen historical documents.
A library
of government documents is also available via FTP. It includes famous speeches,
inaugural addresses, various laws, and even the California State Constitution.
To get to the famous speeches, you need to change directories to /Gov/US-Speech.
To obtain a copy of the California constitution, change to the /Gov/US-Docs
directory and get the california.con file.
An excellent directory of federal
agencies can be found on the Internet. This list includes
several dozen links to federal departments, from the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission and the CIA to the National Museum of Natural History and the
Voice of America.
Policy.Net
also contains CapWeb,
a repository of Congressional information that includes contact information,
addresses, phone and fax numbers, committee assignments, party rosters,
and pointers to other resources.
A U.S. national politics
electronic political magazine on the Net is the Washington
Weekly, which is available via Gopher
and is also on the Web. This magazine's
aim is to "report what people say and do, not why we think they said and
did something." It also offers editorial opinions.
A more lively political
magazine is Steve Gordon's weekly Washington
Compost. It's dedicated to "bashing Democrats and Republicans, Liberals
and Conservatives, and anyone else who happens to fall into our sights."
There are government sites other than
those of the United States on the Net as well. U.K. government information
is available from the CCTA Government
Information Service which includes information on the various organizations
and functions of Her Majesty's Government. Australia's
Parliament also has its own Web page.
Canadian sites on the Web include those
of the provincial governments: Alberta,
British Columbia, Manitoba,
New Brunswick, Ontario,
and Quebec. A collection of Canadian
government sites and indexes can be found on Michael
O'Reilly's home page.
And lastly, the United Nations has a
Web site and a Gopher
server. To find more information on many other countries' government
sites, check the Yahoo
listing.
David R. Noack is a freelance writer based in New York.
