Here is the CIA's report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. It's 1,000 pages but it's all there online.
While we often try to warn students about the wealth of bad information on the Internet, we should try to remember there's also a wealth of great information. If you want to read up on what the newspapers are telling you about this report, you can. And it's painless. You can do it from home in your pajamas at 3 in the morning.
That's not even the best part, though. Right now the report is a PDF, which is basically like a Web-posted Xerox. But right now hundred of people are probably converting it to HTML, which is more readable and quicker to download. People are also probably creating tools to make the report more accessible. New York-based blogger Jason Kottke took the 9/11 Report Executive Summary (which looked like this), and turned it into this. Notice how he made each section linkable. That allows online writers to link to specific parts of the document to make their point.
So when the government makes a key document available online, that's really only the start of the process of creating a usable resource.