Here's one you'll want to bookmark:
Open Government Information Awareness
And here's why:
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. ...
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. ...
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."
Website turns tables on government officials
Boston Globe
July 4, 2003
I couldn't agree more with Barry Steinhardt -- usually. But efforts to stop TIPS, TIA, or whatever they're calling it this week, have failed to prevent the fed from collecting and compiling vast amounts of data on private citizens -- data that should be nobody's damned business. If this is the way we're being forced to live, why should the privacy-invaders themselves be immune? Or, if you can't fight city hall, then let's make sure everybody has to play by the same rules.
Ashcroft & Co. are trying to make you believe that keeping a running tally of the cleaning products you buy at Safeway, or the number of times some angst-ridden teenager checks Catcher in the Rye out of the library, or how badly you screwed up your credit-card debt after getting laid off in 2001 is going to somehow prevent terrorism.
Do you buy that? I don't either. And I wouldn't buy it even if Ash limited this invasion of privacy strictly to six-foot-four Saudi emigres with long beards, Marfan syndrome, and a fetish for karaoke microphones.
In the words of Edmund Burke, "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." Our collective delusion is borne of the greatest motivator of all: fear. Fear that there's a Communist under every bed. Fear that the old Japanese man who lives next door is a spy for Hirohito.
This is oppression "for our own good," an extension of the paranoia that put Japanese-Americans (and Italian-Americans, and German-Americans) in internment camps, and hauled people like Lucille Ball in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The only difference between then and now is that the fearmongers have at their disposal the kind of technology that was only a wet dream to the spooks of 50 and 60 years ago, and are alarmingly, and increasingly, bolder in their tactics.
Don't I care about domestic security? Hell, yes. But this is not the way it works in the real America. In fact, there are so many things so un-, so anti-American about Ashcroft's plan, I don't even know where to begin railing against it.
But this is not John Ashcroft's America. Not yet. Not if you won't let it be.
There used to be an ideal in this country that a person was innocent until proven guilty. It used to be that the Bill of Rights actually meant something. It used to be that the federal government was supposed to keep its big nose out of your private business. It used to be that the government worked for us.
The words of another great thinker come to mind -- one Thomas Jefferson, that fellow who wrote the Declaration of Independence: "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."
Let's not forget that a big part of Ash's plan is to strip Americans -- even those of us born here -- of our citizenship, should we be deemed not quite up to the fed's idea of good little Germans Americans.
That, boys and girls, is tyranny: Submission by the force of fear.
So I'm all for the MIT project. Hey, as long as it's okay for the fed to negate our Fourth Amendment rights, then all bets are off.
After all, Ashcroft & Co. are citizens, too.
Related articles:
Government Prying, the Good Kind. The premise of GIA is that if the government has a right to know personal details about citizens, then citizens have a right to similar information about the government. GIA allows people to explore data, track events, find patterns and build profiles related to specific government officials or political issues. Information about campaign finance, corporate ties and even religion and schooling can be accessed easily. Real-time alerts can be generated when news of interest is breaking. "History shows that when information is concentrated in the hands of an elite, democracy suffers," said Csikszentmihályi. "The writers of the Constitution told us that if people mean to be their own governors, they must arm themselves with information. This project brings that American spirit of self-governance into the era of networked information technology." But like an FBI file, information is not purged if the subject denies its veracity; the denial is simply added to the file. McKinley wryly added that those government officials who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear from GIA. [Wired, July 4, 2003]
MIT launches watch on US government: System to empower an informed citizenry. The MIT system's name consciously echoes the DARPA Terrorist Information Awareness programme. That's a comprehensive domestic snooping plan meant to collect and collate every obtainable scrap of data about everyone in the US population, as betrayed by the name initially given the proposal: Total Information Awareness. It is a chillingly Orwellian departure. MIT's system is intended to counter-balance the US government's grasp of information about its citizens by providing them with effective ways to gather, organize and share information about governmental activities. Given that the Democratic party -- the nominal opposition to the current US Administration -- is widely viewed in the US as subservient, impotent and co-opted by the same big-money influence peddling driving the ruling Republican agenda, such a countervailing populist tool seems timely. [Inquirer, July 5, 2003]
Independence Day thought: Patriot Act II would strip more freedoms. The Bill of Rights is on people's lips as a major campaign prepares to focus attention next week on the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, also known as Patriot Act II. The original Patriot Act was a result of the attacks on New York and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. It granted the authorities sweeping powers to place wiretaps, search homes and offices without warrants, and compile personal data about anyone. In proposing Patriot Act II, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to expand those powers to allow the secret accessing of credit reports and library records and in some cases, to strip U.S. citizenship from those engaged in First Amendment activity. ... It is unlike the Bill of Rights, which says Americans should be protected from unreasonable searches (the Fourth Amendment), may assemble and speak their minds (the First), and have a right to a public and speedy trial (the Sixth). In early 1942, three months into World War II, the FBI and a San Francisco police officer came to the door as [Kurt Voester's] family was eating supper and searched their home -- without any sort of warrant -- for shortwave radios and other devices. Then they announced they were arresting his German-born father... He wonders if 30 years from now, historians will conclude they were no threat at all from the beginning, the way his father wasn't. Just as nearly 11,000 other detained Germans weren't. [L.A. Chung, San Jose Mercury News, July 4, 2003]
As Americans, we have the inherent right to disagree. I was listening to a superpatriot the other day saying what a great country we have and how criticism of its motives weakens the solid front we should be offering the world in these difficult times. He was a Bush apologist who was using patriotism to cover up the fact that we have gotten ourselves into one fine mess in Iraq, but that's neither here nor there. What struck me was the solid-front business he was promulgating. I tolerated his rant as politely as I could, but when I couldn't take it any longer I said, "You know what's truly great about this country? You don't have to be part of a solid front if you don't want to." I ended my discussion with the guy on that note, and as I thought about it later, I realized how much grandeur there was in negativity when one considers freedom. Inherent in its rights, you see, is the right not to. [Al Martinez, Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2003]
Posted 2:37:02 PM 
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