[Reader-list] Government Information Awareness

[Monica Narula]

Government Information Awareness: http://18.85.1.51/index.html

Website turns tables on government officials
By Hiawatha Bray, [Boston] 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 http://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, 
http://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."

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at mailto:bray at globe.com