Treasure Trove of Formerly Secret Government Records Now Online

Love sifting through thousands of government documents? Then does the Electronic Frontier Foundation have a database for you!

The San Francisco-based EFF, which bills itself as "the leading civil liberties group defending your rights in the digital world," has posted its entire stock of government files obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests online.

Want documents from the Viacom versus Google case? Got 'em. How about how the FBI's formerly secret plans to wiretap "Voice over IP" phone services like Skype? Yup. Telecom lobbying? Warrentless wiretaps? The PATRIOT Act? All that and more.

It's like Christmas came early for activists, journalists, conspiracy theorists and academics.

Okay, it might not be as fun as watching a crappy, pirated copy of the latest Robin Hood installment, but it's close, because man, what a boring movie.

Of course, most of the documents are in PDFs, so the text isn't necessarily searchable, making it a little ironic that it's hard to search for the names of contractors digitizing documents for agencies like the EPA.

And naturally a good portion of the government documents were themselves redacted.

But still, it's a wonk's delight. Everyone else can be excused from caring, because surely any interesting conclusions have or will make it on to Drudge or CNN.

Jackson West will be encrypting his VoIP calls from here on.