[wordup] Citizens strike back in intelligence war

[Adam Shand]

This is great, it'll be really interesting to see where this goes.

Adam.

Via: Brett Shand <brett at earthlight.co.nz>
From: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994246
More: http://opengov.media.mit.edu

Citizens strike back in intelligence war
19:00 08 October 03

With the recent demise of the Bush administration's controversial
Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) programme to monitor everyone in
the US, citizens now have a chance to get their own back. A website to
be launched later in 2003 will allow people to post information about
the activities of government organisations, officials and the
judiciary.

The two MIT researchers behind the project face one serious problem:
how to protect themselves against legal action should any of the
postings prove false. The answer, they say, is to borrow a technique
from the underground music-swapping community.

Instead of storing the data in one place, they plan to distribute it
around the internet in a similar way to the notorious Napster software
that got music file-sharing under way. Just like TIA, the new website,
called Government Information Awareness (GIA), is designed to collect
snippets of information to build a database that can later be searched
to reveal patterns of suspicious behaviour.

It is based on a site that Chris Csikszentmihályi and Ryan McKinley of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory set up in
July. That site [http://opengov.media.mit.edu] encourages members of
the public to post information about organisations, officials and
politicians, such as their business links and the source of their
campaign donations.

The original site was hosted on one of MIT's servers. But soon after
the site was launched it had to be dramatically scaled back after
being overwhelmed with traffic and because of legal worries. The
researchers do not edit the content, and became worried that if any of
the postings were malicious or untrue MIT could be held responsible.

Peer-to-peer

They hope that following the Napster approach will get them round this
problem. Instead of storing the data on a single server, so-called
peer-to-peer networks hold data in a number of locations around the
internet, from where it can be downloaded directly.

This strategy thwarted the music industry's attempts to sue some of
the groups that organise the swapping of digital music files. For the
relaunched site, MIT will simply provide the facilities to post data
and search for it. "It will be a sort of citizens' intelligence
agency," says Csikszentmihályi.

"It's an interesting tactic in the battle for civil liberties," says
Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San
Francisco. He believes the site has value, even if it appears to be
stooping to the government's level. "A lot of people do know bits and
pieces - we are handicapped in not being able to connect them."

But whether MIT will be immune from legal action remains unclear. Some
lawyers say that as long as the organisers do not edit the content,
they cannot be held responsible for any libellous material.

Others are more cautious. "Whoever hosts something that is defamatory
and untrue takes a risk," says Mike Godwin, technology adviser for the
public interest group Public Knowledge in Washington DC. The
researchers' strategy may minimise that risk, he says. "Peer-to-peer
is probably the best way."

Celeste Biever