[Peace-discuss] GIA

[Paula Velde]

MIT Media Lab unveiled Government Information Awareness (GIA) today.
-paula

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http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,59495,00.html

http://opengov.media.mit.edu/

Government Prying, The Good Kind
by Michelle Delio, Wired News

"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 Csikszentmih lyi, 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 Csikszentmih lyi. "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 Csikszentmih lyi. "At least as much effort should be
spent developing technologies that allows citizens to track their
government as for government to monitor civilians."
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paula velde
velde at uiuc.edu
www.uiuc.edu/ro/sila
www.uiuc.edu/ro/peaceaction

"there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent
people" - howard zinn