Unfortunately, the amount of traffic the site has seen has slowed it down noticably, but certainly, the idea of the site is still a great one. After all, turning the tables on big brother is cool...
Visit the Government Information Awareness web site.
Read Wired Magazine's coverage of this story.
Read a July 4, 2003 Boston Globe article at Boston.com on this.
Check out the site that inspired the two guys from MIT - the renamed the Total Information Awareness office (it's now called just the Information Awareness Office).
Check out the original TIA office website which is mirrored as it originally appeared on the Darpa.mil website over at TheMemoryHole.Org.
Show your support "for" the Total Information Awareness Office by buying from the TIA gift shop! (All proceeds go to ACLU.)
From Wired.Com:
Government Prying, the Good Kind
By Michelle Delio
02:00 AM Jul. 04, 2003 PT
"The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest," according to the architect of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.
Given that sentiment, it's tempting to think Jefferson would have approved of a new Web-based repository intended to close what the site's developers describe as an ever-widening gap between citizens' ability to monitor the government and the government's ability to monitor its citizens.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab unveiled the Government Information Awareness, or GIA, website Friday. Using applications developed at the Media Lab, GIA collects and collates information about government programs, plans and politicians from the general public and numerous online sources. Currently the database contains information on more than 3,000 public figures.
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 was inspired by the federal government's Terrorist Information Awareness, or TIA, program. Government officials have said that TIA's sole purpose is to identify potential terrorists by comparing information in a broad range of databases that might point to patterns indicative of terrorist activity.
But many privacy advocates see TIA as an overly intrusive effort to monitor Americans' lives in minute detail, from credit card purchases to travel plans.
"Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form their own intelligence agency; to gather, sort and act on information they gather about the government," said MIT graduate student Ryan McKinley, who developed GIA under the direction of Christopher Csikszentmihályi, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group.
"Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government by the people and for the people," McKinley said.
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."
GIA site users can submit information about public figures and government programs anonymously. In an attempt to ensure the accuracy of submitted data, the system automatically contacts the appropriate government officials and offers them an opportunity to confirm or deny submitted data.
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.
McKinley enthusiastically encourages participation by "programmers, political activists from all denominations, lawyers and anyone else who is interested in supporting GIA."
"Computers alone cannot monitor the government," said McKinley. "While we can aggregate data that already exists, a lot of valuable information is not stored in existing databases, but rather in the collective knowledge of the American citizenry. GIA introduces a way to consolidate and share this knowledge."
"The MIT program is a wonderful idea: sunshine disinfects," said political activist Bill Scannell, who has recently been engaged in a battle against the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or CAPPS II, which would require background checks on all airline passengers when they book an airline ticket. These background checks would review credit reports, banking and criminal records.
"As their employers, we American citizens have more of a right to know about government workers living at public expense than they have to know about us," Scannell said.
GIA looks like a standard website, but it is actually a suite of information technologies that actively peruse data, accept contributions and post alerts about government.
"We've had to solve the problem of how to build a useful, egalitarian and massively scaleable database of sensitive information collected from diverse and unknown sources," said McKinley.
GIA is "open source" -- the databases it utilizes are openly presented for public perusal and use elsewhere.
"If we are to maintain a democracy, it's crucial to ensure accountability," said Csikszentmihályi. "At least as much effort should be spent developing technologies that allows citizens to track their government as for government to monitor civilians."
From The Boston Globe's website:
Website turns tables on government officials
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 7/4/2003
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."
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