__A look at the top private sites repackaging information for public consumption. __
Cryptome
www.cryptome.org
A repository for the kind of intelligence you can't find on the CIA's site. Webmaster John Young (see Must Read: People, page 112) posts tales of counter-subversion operations and infotech attacks and welcomes "documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide." When the FBI called the 64-year-old last July to pass along the Japanese government's request that he pull a list identifying members of an Asian intelligence agency, he declined.
Edgar Online
www.edgar-online.com
There's usually a two-day lag before documents filed with the SEC are available on its official site - an unacceptable wait in the trigger-happy new economy. Edgar Online serves up the records in a day (some cost a small fee) and is the only site with a "people" search option. When you have a burning question about your CEO - did the firm pay for her swanky Benz? - you can type in her name and pull up the goods.
Federation of American Scientists
www.fas.org
All the news the administration sees fit to post is on the White House pages, but to lift the veil of secrecy in the national security state, there's FAS. The Washington, DC-based federation is best known for its half-century of analysis of US nuclear weapons policy and its advocacy of policies that would put off the end of the world for a while. The site's best feature: A comprehensive search on US military and intelligence entanglements around the globe.
GovBot
ciir2.cs.umass.edu/govbot
Rather than slogging through announcements from each agency at separate sites, UMass's Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval compiled 1,594,012 Web pages from government and military sites around the country. Information filtering, data mining, and search engine advancement are the lab's specialties, so you can bet on finding that needle in a haystack.
Jonathan's Space Report
hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/jsr/jsr.html
NASA may do a good job of keeping the public informed about the Mars Pathfinder, but for an encyclopedic rundown of every launch anywhere since space travel began, visit the pages compiled by Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And for the real pay dirt, check what the whistleblowers say on NASAWatch (www.nasawatch.com), an independent monitor of space agency activities.
Opensecrets
www.opensecrets.org
Opensecrets does the math that the Federal Elections Commission site shuns. It boasts highly refined candidate contribution breakdowns and tallied data on donors that's sortable by name, residence, and company. Opensecrets may be running to catch up with current filings, but it has in-depth coverage (access personal financial disclosure forms for all 535 members of Congress) and imagination (search contributions by zip code). For more number-crunching, hit www.fecinfo.com.
Vote Smart
www.vote-smart.org
Thomas stores a ton of legislative paperwork, but you'll have a hard time finding out how one representative voted on a particular bill. To vet your favorite public official's scorecard, visit Vote Smart's searchable database containing the voting records of 13,000 public office holders, along with their position statements and backgrounds.
