Development Blog

More Missing White House Emails...



The White House has recently released additional documents to CREW in response to our lawsuit filed against the Executive Office of the President (EOP), the Office of Administration and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) back in September 2007.  CREW’s lawsuit stemmed from the millions of e-mails that were improperly ...



Fifteenth Installment of Border Fence Documents...



On January 21, 2010, CREW received the fifteenth installment of documents in a series of responses to our FOIA request sent to U.S. Customs and Border Protection regarding the construction of fencing along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.  CREW has received hundreds of documents from U.S. Customs and ...



E-Gov Travel: Creating Money Savings or Inefficiency in Government?



Today, CREW posted four documents we received from the General Services Administration (GSA) in response to our November 10, 2009 FOIA request. CREW filed FOIA requests with the GSA, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Internal Revenue Service seeking records related to savings from the e-Government Travel Service (e-Gov Travel), a web-based travel management service provided to the federal government by three contractors. When the $450 million e-Gov Travel contract was awarded in ...



Three years later...



After over three years of waiting for a response, CREW finally received documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) on Wednesday related to our FOIA request from 2006.  CREW had originally sent FOIA requests to the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the


What is the truth behind Global Warming? Check out new CEQ documents regarding climate change



On December 7th, 2009, CREW received a new batch of documents pertaining to our FOIA request sent to the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), asking for all records in the agency’s possession mentioning or relating to the causes associated with global warming or climate change.   The FOIA request was filed in May of 2006 after media


CREW receives fresh batch of documents from Veteran Affairs in regards to PTSD



On November 12, 2009, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) received another set of documents related to its FOIA Request with the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) for records pertaining to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).   This request stemmed from an email that was obtained from a VA ...



CREW calls for investigation into distribution of H1N1 Vaccine to Wall Street Execs



Today, CREW filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) seeking documents related to the policies and practices the agency is following with respect to the distribution of the H1N1 vaccine.

CREW’s FOIA request is in response to the public outrage over


Were decisions made by Bush on the border fence influenced buy his donors? New DHS docs posted



On October 21, 2009, CREW received another set of documents it garnered from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) relating to Ray L. Hunt, Hunt Consolidated, Inc., and the construction of fencing along the border between the U.S. and Mexico.  DHS’s selection of locations for construction of fencing along the southern U.S. border has been the subject of extensive media coverage and ...



Collaborative Online Government Document Database Launches Today



Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), in conjunction with a coalition of government watchdog groups, launched a new online government document database, governmentdocs.orgon Thursday, November 8.

The database houses Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) responses, and other government documents, from a number of organizations, that can be browsed, searched and reviewed. It is the only one of its kind.

Organizations including CREW, Project on Government ...



Service update for October 18th



GovernmentDocs.org will be unavailable Thursday, October 18th from 8am until 8pm EDT as we perform scheduled maintenance and systemwide optimization.

Zylab, the company that develops the OCR backend of GovernmentDocs.org, will be on-site assisting us as we optimize site performance.  The two components we are working on are Search and OCR Capacity.

Specifically, we will be working with Zylab to create a more robust implementation of their search ...



FOIA Document Review System (Version 1.0) Technology



Version 1.0 of the FOIA Document Review System (DRS) has been built using the a software stack composed of Windows Server, Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server and .NET Framework Version 2.0.  Additionally, CREW has licensed ZyLAB’s ZyIMAGE Information Access Platform (IAP) and integrated this software package as the engine for document processing, storage, management and display.  The website will be run on three powerful Dell servers and hosted at the Equinix Ashburn data ...