Here's something worth thinking about, from today's WaPo:

Deep inside the Library of Congress, 500 researchers pound out the secret intelligence Congress uses to make law. Legislators request 6,000 Congressional Research Service reports a year, on weapons systems and farm subsidies, prescription prices and energy use. Together, they offer what lobbyists and industry want most: clues to what's next on the Hill. For years, open-government groups have fought to make the reports public, and for years, many lawmakers have kept them under wraps. Or so they thought.

CRS is a vital tool for Members and staff, and consistently produces some of the most reliable, non-partisan research products available, on a dizzying array of subjects. Their task, essentially, is finding the answers to anything Members want to know about. And with an army of skilled researchers and the incredible resources of the Library of Congress, they're not only turning out the best "intelligence" around, but they're also creating a secondary market for the stuff.

By insisting on secrecy, Congress instead created a bootleg market for the research. Every day, a small Texas company compiles the reports and sells them to lobbyists, lawyers and others who pay thousands of dollars for a peek at the reports and what they say about the congressional agenda. And it's all legal.

Why? Because CRS produces these reports for Congress, as their employees. That makes their reports essentially work for hire, and that means that they're the property of Congress, and the Congress can dispose of them as they see fit. In practice, that means that most Members will happily supply constituents with copies of prepared reports (though they're not supposed to commission such reports on anyone else's behalf). But in order to request a copy, you've got to know it exists.

That's the information that's most jealously guarded, as the full Post article notes, because it's a rich source of "intelligence" on what Members of Congress are asking questions about (and therefore a hint about what legislation they may be pondering). But there's another reason, too. As Walt Seager, the researcher whose company sells subscriptions to compilations of the reports, explains:

For one thing, he said, "incumbents like to provide them to their constituents [saying] 'glad to be of service, hint, hint, remember me at election time.' " Second, he said, CRS is "a think tank working for [members] exclusively and not for the people running against them. They've got all this brainpower behind them making them look very knowledgeable."

So how can you, Mr. or Ms. Lowly Citizen, get a peek into "Congress' Brain" the way denizens of "Gucci Gulch" do? Well, for a cool four grand a year, you can subscribe to Seager's "Gallery Watch."

The next best option? Thank your lucky stars for the dedication of the Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood, and add their Secrecy News to your blogroll, as I have. Aftergood has made it his mission -- or at least one of them -- to compile and disseminate the newest and most notable CRS reports he can get his hands on. According to the Post, the free stuff lags considerably behind the pay services, with about 10% of the CRS output available, but it's a good start and a great idea.

So go ahead and poke around. It just may be that a community like Daily Kos can take the Secrecy News' work to the next level, providing another collaborative forum for analysis and discussion of what Aftergood turns up for us.

Shop around. It's your money paying for it, after all.