From: Kalkor (kalkor@kalkor.com)
Date: Thu Jul 10 2003 - 11:31:26 MDT
Oh my, you've just filled my reading list for the next 6 months, playing
catch-up. Thank you for this awesome link, Joe!
Gotta start local... hmmmm, portland industry and government...
Kalkor
-----Original Message-----
>
> 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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