US Citizens Strike Back in Intelligence War
============================================
Celeste Biever 19:00 08 October 03 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
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 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,"
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."
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994246
Government Information Awareness: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask] In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html
|
