>
>  Read below to learn how two guys from MIT are playing
> tit for tat with the
>  politicians with a Government Information Awareness
> (GIA) system. And learn how
>  they turned up the heat a notch over the Independence
> Day weekend.
>
>  At the end of the article, we'll give you a link so
> you can check out this
>  fun sight for
>  yourself.
>
>  =============================================
>  <A HREF="http://opengov.media.mit.edu/">Open
> Government Information Awareness
>  </A>
>  http://opengov.media.mit.edu
>
>  Website turns tables on government officials
>  By Hiawatha Bray
>  Published in the Boston Globe 7/4/2003
>  http://tinyurl.com/g27h
>
>  Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal
> surveillance system, two
>  researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology are celebrating the
>  Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will
> let citizens create dossiers
>  on government officials.
>
>  The system will start by offering standard background
> information on
>  politicians, but then go one bold step further, by
> asking Internet users to submit
>  their own intelligence reports on government
> officials -- reports that will be
>  published with no effort to verify their accuracy.
>
>  "It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency," said
> Chris Csikszentmihalyi,
>  assistant
>  professor at the MIT Media Lab.
>
>  He and graduate student Ryan McKinley created the
> Government Information
>  Awareness (GIA) project as a response to the US
> government's Total Information
>  Awareness program (TIA).
>
>  Revealed last year, TIA seeks to track possible
> terrorist activity by
>  analyzing vast amounts of information stored in
> government and private databases,
>  such as credit card data. The system would use this
> information to analyze the
>  actions of millions of people, in an effort to spot
> patterns that could indicate
>  a terrorist threat.
>
>  News of the plan outraged civil libertarians and
> prompted Congress to set
>  limits on the scope of such activity. The Defense
> Department then renamed the
>  program Terrorist Information Awareness, to ease
> public concern.
>
>  But the controversy gave McKinley the idea for the
> GIA project. "If total
>  information exists," he said, "really the same effort
> should be spent to make the
>  same information at the leadership level at least as
> transparent -- in my
>  opinion, more transparent."
>
>  McKinley worked with Csikszentmihalyi to design the
> GIA system. It's partly
>  based on technology used to create Internet indexes
> such as Google. Software
>  crawls around Internet sites that store large amounts
> of information about
>  politicians. These include independent political
> sites like opensecrets.org, as
>  well as sites run by government agencies. McKinley
> created software that ferrets
>  out the useful data from these sites, and loads it
> into the GIA database. The
>  result is a one-stop research
>  site for basic information on key officials.
>
>  The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock
> political coverage provided
>  by cable TV's C-Span networks. McKinley and
> Csikszentmihalyi use video cameras
>  to capture images of people appearing on C-Span,
> which generally includes the
>  names of people shown on screen. A computer program
> "reads" each name, and
>  links it to any information about that person stored
> in the database. By
>  clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a
> complete rundown on all
>  available data about that person.
>
>  The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the
> people appearing on C-Span
>  at that moment. If there's a dossier on a particular
> person, clicking on the
>  picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live
> government hearing could
>  learn which companies have contributed to a member of
> Congress's reelection
>  campaign, before the politician had even finished
> speaking.
>
>  All of the information currently on the site is
> available from public
>  sources. But GIA will go one step further. Starting
> today, the site will allow the
>  public to submit information about government
> officials, and this information
>  will be made available to anyone visiting the site.
> No effort will be made to
>  verify the accuracy of the data.
>
>  This approach to Internet publishing isn't new. It
> resembles a method known
>  as Wiki, in which a website is constantly amended by
> visitors who contribute
>  new information. The best known Wiki site,
> www.wikipedia.org, is an online
>  encyclopedia created entirely by visitors who have
> voluntarily written nearly
>  140,000 articles, on subjects ranging from astronomy
> to Roman mythology. Any
>  Wikipedia user who thinks he has spotted an error or
> wants to add information can
>  modify the article. Unlike at a standard encyclopedia
> operation, there is no
>  central authority to edit or reject articles.
>
>  The GIA approach, though, raises the possibility that
> people could post
>  libelous information, or data that unreasonably
> compromises a person's privacy.
>
>  That troubles Barry Steinhardt, director of the
> Technology & Liberty Program
>  of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We think that
> there should be some
>  restrictions on the publishing of personally
> identifiable information, whether it
>  involves government officials or not," he said.
>
>  But he noted that the public has a right to know some
> things about a
>  politician that would be properly kept private about
> an ordinary citizen. For
>  instance, voters have a right to know where a
> politician sends his children to school,
>  if that politician has taken a strong stand on school
> vouchers.
>
>  "Do they have the right to publish every piece of
> data they're going to
>  publish?" Steinhardt asked. "It's going to depend on
> what they publish."
>
>  In any case, Steinhardt said, McKinley and
> Csikszentmihalyi have a First
>  Amendment right to set up the GIA project. And he
> said that it's a valuable
>  response to the government's TIA surveillance. "I
> assume the point of this is,
>  turnabout is fair play."
>
>  On a page of the GIA website, at
> opengov.media.mit.edu, McKinley and
>  Csikszentmihalyi give their answer to questions about
> the legitimacy of their actions.
>
>  "Is it legal?" the site reads. "It should be."
>
>  -----
>  If you think in pictures like I do and you think GIA
> is a delicious idea,
>  you'll
>  appreciate the link called "Inspiration."
>
>  Jim Babka, President
>  American Liberty Foundation
>  |*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|
>
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>  http://www.AmericanLibertyFoundation.org
>
>  CONTRIBUTE to the Foundation at
>  http://www.AmericanLibertyFoundation.org/gateway.htm
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