Information, Please

Subscribers to Gallery Watch pay about $4,000 a year to get all the CRS reports, online and searchable, delivered weekly.

Gallery Watch sells other legislative tracking tools, but the reports are the key reason clients subscribe, said Patrick Riendeau, a sales executive. Besides lobbyists, lawyers, and corporations, universities and news organizations subscribe.

At a recent meeting for potential customers, Riendeau explained that clients scan the reports for intelligence "kind of how the CIA operates," by spotting the political trends suggested by their contents and timing, he said. About a year ago, lawmakers made a flurry of requests for CRS reports related to North Korean counterfeiting of U.S. currency; not until months later, when the Treasury Department cracked down on North Korea, did the issue appear in newspapers.

Gallery Watch, owned by the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, gets the publications from Seager, 68, a former trade magazine journalist based in Damascus, who for 20 years has mined the Hill for them.

"I'm just an old Washington journalist who knows how to find things," Seager said. He got started, he said, two decades ago when he found a CRS catalogue of new reports in a congressman's office. He made copies of it and sold subscriptions, with instructions on how to get the reports by contacting lawmakers. When CRS stopped publishing the listing, Seager started finding the reports himself.

"I upload an average of about 100 a week" to Gallery Watch, he said.

If the reports were ever made available to all, "I would comfortably retire to my mountain retreat in West Virginia and be very happy, because that's the way it should be -- taxpayers pay for them," he said.

But he doesn't think that will happen. 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."

"The less I know, the better," said Gallery Watch Senior Vice President Arnie Thomas about Seager's methods.

While he would not provide a list of clients, citing privacy concerns, the company's Web site client list includes lobbying and law firms, Mitsubishi, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and the Department of Agriculture.

Deloitte & Touche lobbyists hailed Gallery Watch in an online testimonial: "With the collapse of Enron . . . almost daily there were numerous bills being introduced that required us to research and analyze the impact of the proposed legislation on the accounting profession," one said. "We need a tool to tell us when something is going on."

Staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Alice Crites contributed to this report.