Citizens strike back in intelligence war
Chief Thracian
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Citizens strike back in intelligence war
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994246
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.
[ http://opengov.media.mit.edu/ ]
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 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
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