According to the New York Times, the United States Air Force is blocking access to any web sites that have posted secret diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks. This includes The Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and many other sites that have posted the cables in full or in part.

I'm curious as to how far government agencies and military departments are willing to go to block access to the public cables. In a most extreme case, would the government block itself from accessing its own web sites?

If a member of Congress sympathetic to WikiLeaks (Ron Paul? Jim McDermott?) wanted to they could find a way to insert the cables into the Congressional Record or into the public domain by making it available through a committee hearing.

There are two options for getting the cables into the Congressional Record, the official record of the floors of both the House and the Senate.

Submitting the cables into the Congressional Record as an Extension of Remarks would be extremely difficult – likely impossible.

The relevant rules state that lawmakers, in submissions to extend their remarks, must get “some type of permission” before submitting the remarks. Those submissions are made through the leadership desk.

I highly doubt that any member of leadership or even the floor staff would allow the cables to be submitted into the Record for obvious reasons.

The other option would be reading the cables into the Record out loud. This would undoubtedly be blocked by an objecting lawmaker. There are enough lawmakers who object to WikiLeaks and would certainly object to Congress being used as a forum to distribute cables made available through WikiLeaks.

The most direct and unobstructed way to get the cables into the official realm of Congress would be to follow the example of former Sen. Mike Gravel.

In 1971 Sen. Mike Gravel convened a hearing in the subcommittee that he chaired. While the Buildings and Grounds subcommittee did not appear to have jurisdiction over the issues of war and peace, Gravel held a hearing on how the Vietnam War was draining funding for public buildings. After hearing testimony from one witness, Gravel began to read into the committee record the Pentagon Papers, classified documents leaked by Daniel Ellsburg to the New York Times.

he New York Times and other papers had been posting pieces of the Papers, a collection of secret government studies related to the Vietnam War, which prompted the Justice Department to seek an injunction to shut down the newspapers. Ellsburg surreptitiously sent the Papers to Gravel for him to read into the official record as a safety net for publication.

Gravel read the Papers for hours before stopping and, with no other senators present, submitted the entirety of the Papers into the official record of his subcommittee.

Today, that would mean that Gravel's subcommittee record would be printed and posted to a variety of government web sites include the legislative search engine THOMAS, which is hosted on the Library of Congress' servers, and the Government Printing Office, located at GPO.gov.

Would the Air Force shut down access to the Library of Congress or the Government Printing Office or to Congress' web pages?

Some recent discussions of WikiLeaks have labeled information leaks as the silver bullet in creating a more transparent government. There certainly have been times when leaks have had profound effects on how the government operates, and this is among them (the Pentagon Papers, Mark Felt a.k.a. Deep Throat, and Thomas Lawson also come to mind). It is, however, shortsighted to conceive of leaks as a replacement to the systematic requirements for openness that are essential to our democracy. Leaks are a supplement to transparency; not the foundation for it.

For that reason, Sunlight has focused on building tools and databases of influence data; pressuring the government to adopt policies for transparency; investigating political influence; and cultivating fundamental, systemic, and cultural changes by both citizens and government officials. And while we have from time to time built projects out of non-public information -- accepting anonymously submitted invitations to political fundraisers to build our PoliticalPartyTime.org site, as well as supporting OpenCRS.com, which makes Congressional Research Service reports available to the public for free -- the core of our work is to create a government whose default is to be meaningfully transparent online, in real time, so that our government’s operations and influences are available to the public.

Information leaks can be a powerful tool for openness, but they are just a single tool among many.

This post was co-written by Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, Sunlight's co-founders.

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 with one core idea: that when information about what our government is doing and who is trying to influence it is made broadly available on the Internet, we as individuals and as a society can better watch over our government, raise questions, root out corruption, highlight problems, elevate solutions, and in so doing, foster real government accountability and strengthen public faith in our institutions. While we have made much progress, we have a long way to go towards our goal of a government that is as transparent and accountable as possible.

We at Sunlight are transparency advocates. But we are not anti-secrecy per se. Information about private individuals and their private lives deserve to remain private. Some secrets about ongoing military operations and security activities should not be revealed to the public. Some debates over public policy can and should be done behind closed doors to allow for confidential negotiations as long as there is public review. But we strongly believe that information about the workings of government should, in general, be public. There should be fewer secrets, not more. Thus the current controversy over the non-profit Internet media organization, WikiLeaks, warrants that we speak out.

Thanks to the Internet, there is now a greater ability to shine light on the workings of government and other powerful actors. This democratization of watch-dogging is a profoundly good thing.  It must be vigorously protected against censors -- those who would prefer the public know less, not more, about what they are doing. More information, plus the Internet’s power to spread it beyond centralized control, may be our best defense against bad or illegal behavior.

WikiLeaks may be no more or less perfect than other media entities. Freedom of the press and of speech are often messy. But these rights are crucial, enshrined and protected as our most fundamental principles and practices.  The First Amendment is there to establish that it is not the job of the media in a democratic society to protect those in power from embarrassment or exposure. Thus, even when we are faced with what may we think of as “bad” press or speech, we must avoid responding with censorship -- the cure must not be worse than the disease.

If crimes have been committed in connection with the WikiLeaks experience, let the government make that case in court and let due process follow its course. But in the meantime, calls by some government leaders for the persecution of Julian Assange, or the extreme calls for his assassination, the intimidation of private internet service providers; the extra-legal freezing of WikiLeaks assets; and the blocking of the display of WikiLeaks-related information on government computers—even at the hallowed Library of Congress, where you can read all manner of subversive books—are affronts to an open society, a perversion of Internet activity, and a dagger aimed at the heart of the modern transparency movement.

The current reaction to WikiLeaks in the United States has exposed the vulnerability of any online publisher here to government pressure. This chilling effect on our democracy must be opposed.

Once again, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) has introduced a resolution in the Senate to put non-confidential Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports online. Heather West at the Center for Democracy & Technology’s “PolicyBeta” blog  writes that a solid bi-partisan group of senators have joined Lieberman as co-sponsors. S. Res. 118 is a Senate resolution, which means the Senate Rules Committee and an overall Senate vote are all that’s needed to open the reports to the public -- who paid for them to be produced in the first place.

CRS is a $100 million funded “think tank” housed in the Library of Congress that researches and writes reports for Congressional lawmakers and their staff on current topics. They include serious and smart analysis, and the reports are well worth reading if you are interested in the hot issues of the day. These reports exist on an internal server on the Hill, but the public is denied access to them. The only way you can get them in by calling a lawmaker’s office and requesting a copy. (Of course, how do you know to ask about a report if its existence isn’t publicly listed someplace…A classic Washington Catch-22.)

Open CRS, a CDT project and Sunlight grantee, provides citizens access to CRS Reports already in the public domain and encourages Congress to provide public access to all CRS Reports. OpenCRS gets their copies from various people who choose to ‘liberate’ them. WikiLeaks, a Web site that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors, has released nearly a billion dollars worth of CRS reports, as well. There is one commercial service that manages someway, somehow to get all of them all. This service charges an arm and a leg.

Sunlight shares CDT’s demand that Congress open up all CRS reports to the public. This is an easy transparency reform. Kudos to Sen. Lieberman and his co-sponsors on continuing to press this important and common sense reform.