I've read NASA tech reports for years too; seems like one of those things that's "always" been online, though I don't know when precisely it went online. It's been online long enough, at least, to have even accumulated some episodes of backlash. In 2013, it was forced offline for a few months, because Congresspeople claimed that it might include content The Chinese could use to reconstruct national-security-sensitive information, so demanded that reports undergo a security audit: http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/03/ntrs_dark/
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