Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Energy Task Force Documents Available Online

Skeptical that you are gettting the full picture about energy policymaking from the news? Now you can read for yourself via, Outraged Moderates, the files from the federal Energy Task Force. Wired reports:

They also include a now-infamous e-mail, known as the "If You Were King" memo, written by an Energy Department employee to a lobbyist asking what, if the lobbyist were king, he would like to see included in the nation's energy policy.

Some of the documents are informative for what they don't say. A 1.5-page e-mail between two Department of Energy employees features only the greeting to "Margot" and a final sentence reading, "Let me know if you have any further questions." The rest of the e-mail was blanked out by the department before it was forced to release the document in the lawsuit.

"This would be a crucial document the public would want to know about. But the entire document and other documents were redacted so heavily there was really no point in the Energy Department releasing it," Anderson said.

Anderson said that seeing the documents themselves, rather than reading about them through the filter of a news article, has a greater impact.

But you better have a fast Internet connection--the Energy documents alone are 608MB.