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Government Information Awareness
gbjbaanb writes "Wired News is reporting about the GIA, software inspired by the TIA program. '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.'"
I wonder if it's just a coincidence that this site was put up on the 4th of July?
Things like credit card purchases, phone bills, personal contact information, organizational affiliations, travel history, books checked out from the library -- you know, things you wouldn't want to hide unless you were a criminal?
People like these are the true patriots. Unlike my neighbors who never flown a flag until 9/11.
Politicians don't like it when they are held to the same standard as everyone else. It will be *really* funny when some unethical "contributions" are discovered. When Politicians see just how bad stuff like this is, maybe they will think twice.
In a democratic republic, WE are the government. And, if you don't feel you are, take a more active role and make it so.
I think that the government has done way too much for the sake of secrecy against its own citezens. Perhaps they should reconsider much of their classified data, especially that which is not-vital or threatening to the American nation as a whole.
However, personal information should be kept secret. Displaying the data of as many government officials as possible just as "proper compensation" for the data they collect about us is not only unfair to the politicians but unfair to us (how dare them think we would be so stupid). Thousands of politicians vs. millions of people with their data harvested. It's arrogance on the government's part to think such a thing.
Did George Orwell ever imagine a world where the populace itself would become the Big Brother of the government? It's 1984 in reverse. Quite ironic really. I wonder how the politicians will react. Increased privacy laws? We'll see. Maybe not in my lifetime though...
"Will it include the same information they collect? "
I think individuals pushing for massive data collection should be the most heavily looked-at people on there. People like John Poindexter, John Ashcroft, and any Congresscritter who shows support for anything like the TIA needs to be followed, reported on, have their every purchase logged, their every movement cataloged, their every affair made public, and have every habit at the fingertips of the world. Let's show these people just what it is we don't like about programs like the TIA. Let's show them what it's like to have strangers turning your life into a database entry. Something like GIA could very easily turn into a platform for opposing programs like the TIA with actions instead of words. I'm not saying we should be in-you-face harassing these people; I'm saying we should simply find out every bit of possible information about them on a continuing basis until they drop support for 1984-inspired programs. If anyone who lives near these people would like to help out, then all the better.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
At first, I thought sure, this'll work, those politicians are too smart to get caught doing their shady stuff out in the open.
/NO CARRIER
Then I realized NO THEY AREN'T.
So, this should be fun. Wonder how long before this site quietly goes away.
Just remember folks, this is the government you are talking about. If they want, they can make you disapp...
Sent from your iPad.
"But if it was serious, it was just plain scary."
So are the programs that many of these people are pushing for. TIPS, TIA, Magic Lantern, roving wiretaps, constant surveillance, and more and more and more. If these people want to do it to us, why is it you have a problem with the people of this country doing it right back to them?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The name and concept is supposed to be a spin of the Government's TIA (Terrorist Information Awareness) program that spys on citizens for terrorist activity. More information on TIA is available at DARPA and a story that Wired ran.
-Valen
While I am not sure if you are serious or not, your logic is flawed. The simple fact that the government has ACCESS to those files should not be legal. This is about challenging your government. Its what happens in fascist and dictator states.
"Oh Look, he checked out an article by Locke, or Marx, or Lenin, Or an Islamic Text.....he MUST be doing something illegal. Kill him". While this is extreme, the government knowing what people are doing, seeing, reading, and learning allows them to find and target those with different political beliefs than they. The whole point of a free democracy is to prevent such things.
The MIT cause hopes to prevent the government from having all the info and all the power, and returns some power to the people. The simple fact is, that behind every bad decision in government, there is a person responsible. The MIT site helps us to pinpoint who, so we (the PEOPLE, the CITIZENS) to not elect next time, or to ask our reps to fire.
This idea is phenomenal. Finally a way for people to do a search on some meaningful information about their government officials. Hopefully, it will support more government databases in the future, as I believe that there are more than 3,000 government officials in the US.
/.ed ;-)
Unfortunately, I can't search on anything cuz the site just got
Here, on the 4th of July, Americans have been presented with something that many of them would certainly like to have. Information on the individuals that have power over them. But is it not true that much of the information is available to the general public? The information in the database, which now contains information on more than 3,000 public figures, seems to be accessible enough. It would include information about campaign finance, corporate ties, etc. I suppose that this website would facilitate finding such information, which certainly is good. But it is all information that already seems to be avilable to us, as it can be submitted by people like you and I (and anonymously: good news for those who like to post as ACs here.)
But what I'm sure many people would want is a more open government. One that does not keep as many secrets. One that does not do as much behind our backs. One in which there is less "classified information" although that may be a pipe dream. I understand that much information was removed from sites with the .mil TLD as a cetain terrorist organization was allegedly getting much useful information from it.
But this stil seems to be a good idea. It'll make much information accessible to U.S. citizens, and, perhaps, if nothing else, hold up a mirror to those in power who want as much information on us as possible.
After all, it's supposed to be an open and transparent government despite Dumbya's efforts otherwise. But I wonder if it will survive. Some years ago, video rental outfits leaked a list of porno movies that members of congress and high-ranking justices were watching. Congress instantly passed legislation making it illegal to do that. It seemed that they didn't like people probing their personal viewing and reading habits. However, these same bunch of baffoons have no problem doing the same to Joe Public ala the Patriot Act and TIA.
Keep this in mind in 2004 and vote.
When all else fails, run.
The mayor supported the Chief of Police in defying a Court Order not to troll through people's garbage without a warrant. But when a weekly paper went through THEIR garbage and published their findings (which were pretty banal, nothing spicey) the cop got "hostile" and the mayor went "ballistic"
Both should lose their jobs.
http://www.wweek.com/flatfiles/News3485.lasso
In true foil-hat fashion, I can't help but think that the GIA will only cover a fraction of what our government really does.
If people start using the GIA as a standard for truth, if they say "It's in the GIA, it must be true," then the government will have an incredibly convenient way to encourage the belief in whatever information or misinformation it feels like. This would certainly have more clout than mass media outlets, which obviously have their own credibility issues.
No government tells its citizens everything, and of what it does tell them, it's never the whole truth. What I do hope for from the GIA is at least apparent accountability that, while not touching upon all the madman's deeds that go on in secret subterranean complexes, will at least raise the public consciousness with regard to elected officials and get them (both the public and the officials) to act a little more responsible.
The coolest voice ever.
SELECT name FROM FederalPoliticians WHERE name.bimbo<>name.wife
Any type of information they can collect and access without a search warrant should be fair game for the populace to access about them. And with current legislative trends that body of information is growing ever larger. Hence I was only half-sarcastic.
cryptome.org is a good site as well. It isn't the easiest site to get around, but its comprehensive. Maybe there can be a marriage of the two. It would be beautiful.
There is system to rank the credability of the contributors to keep things in check, similar to epinions' trustworthiness ranking system.
However, this could still be open to widespread abuse with a coordinated effort. A person posting a comment could be backed up by hundreds of people vouching for his or her integrity, and even if the politician replies denying the claim, the damage is already done, which is the whole point behind a smear campaign.
The lesson is, be weary of all information you receive from anywhere. Everything is suspect and most of the details of information you receive about things you did not witness in first person is probably 90% incorrect. Did you ever do that experiment in school where you whisper a phrase around in a circle of people and by the time it comes back to you it's completely different?
It will be interesting to see how this page plays out, to see if it is compromised by hundreds or thousands of people with an ajenda. It's hard to pick up on subtle slanting of information until it's too late.
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." -- Winston Churchill
---Mike
Looks like the fact-checking needs a little work, as shown here...
This is an excellent idea, and one which deserves to do well. The delicate system of checks-and-balances has been become skewed of late, and our privacy has been steadily eroded.
The balance needs correcting, and this is a good way to set about it, by affecting the decision-makers personally.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
Whoosh! Thats the sound of something going straight over your head.
1) Government declares they`ll starts keeping info on citizens in databases.
2) Citizens say they'll do the same about the government
3) You find b scary. Where were you when a was announced?
I like the premise, but this is a very superficial first effort. The site is slow, and you can get just about all of the same information at www.firstgov.gov. Knowing several public officials, I tried to use the site to see just what dirt I could dig up. I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I couldn't even get an official bio on all but the most prominent elected officials.
If TIA does nothing more than this, then we have very little to worry about.
One thing I did find interesting was looking at campaign contributions. The amount of money behind Liddy Dole and Hillary Clinton is fucking astounding. More then Ed Kennedy, more than Fritz Hollings - more than anyone else I looked at (and I looked at many).
aside from campaign money there's just not that much there. No corporate holdings (which would be a helluva lot more interesting than donations), no special interest alliances - not much of nothing.
That's why the ACLU is opposed to TIA and the infamous TIPS program.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
GWB: What happen?
JA: Somebody set up us a website.
GWB: We get e-mail.
JA: Outlook Express turn on.
MIT: How are you gentlemen?
MIT: All your information are belong to us.
GWB: What you say?
MIT: You are on the way to major scandals.
MIT: You have no chance to deny cocaine use allegations, make your time.
GWB: For great justice, take off every DDoS attack!
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.
This is all fine and dandy except for one small thing: the government does not have a right to know personal details about citizens with the force of Big Brother's dream come true: TIA. I think it would be more beneficial to channel the energy that goes into GIA into making sure we elect leaders who will kill TIA before it really gets rolling. And un-electing those who permitted it to be born in the first place. Besides, if Big Brother has anything to say about it, this MIT Media Lab project will last only until the first time MIT is unexpectedly denied a government research grant or contract.
Ted Nelson's Xanadu, which was sort of like an overcentralized World Wide Web with revision control and micropayments, was the first attempt in this direction. The "Wiki" crowd has the same idea.
This works well for popular culture and badly for almost everything else. To work, it needs a fan base. Slashdot is about as good as this idea gets.
I submitted this article at 10:00 AM PST, 1:00 PM EST, this morning, but it was rejected. I don't know why that was the case, except I didn't take the standard /. twist to these issues.
I believe this is actually an extremely positive step, for I am in agreement with David Brian and the arguments he makes in The Transparent Society , saying that we should realize that there is no privacy, and that we should focus on building transparency in our society.
When we struggle to preserve annonimity and privacy, we are actually playing into the hands of those that would be despots, by building a system where they don't have to be accountable for their actions. For a small example of this one, think of how many times you have heard a government official state, when speaking of some action that is being challenged, "We can't discuss this matter do to privacy issues." Whose privacy are they protecting? The person that is challenging a wrongful firing or the child that claims they were abused in the local youth facility? No, they are protecting themselves, but they are using (and abusing) our focus on privacy at all costs to protect themselves and their positions.
Bring on the transparent society. Let's work to end this situation!
Politicians have always been open relays to anyone who offers up money. A large majority of them are scum, whether by their own choice or by having to be scum because they are the proxies of scum. For most of history, they've been able to keep this under the carpet, because the ordinary people couldn't really make ripples; They didn't have the means of distribution available to them. Now the 'net has turned that on it's head.
For a long time, politicians have wanted to and usually succedded in trying to control the people because they were the only ones who had the means of distribution available to them. Now here comes the internet and turns that around and kicks it soundly out the door. Now anyone can make their opinions available to millions in a matter of minutes or seconds.
I suppose what I'm getting at is that GIA is backlash, to remind our politicians that they no longer control information or it's distribution. And you can bet they'll be screaming and kicking like spoiled little brats from hell. However, try all you want to put this magnesium-and-sodium candle out. It'll always come back, and if you douse it with water it'll only burn hotter.
Interestingly, most current politicians haven't played with this kind of fire yet, and they haven't learned that you'll get burned.
Or in other words, "I say we stalk 'em" (Score: +5, insightful)
OR "If they plan on stalking us, and argue there's no reason we should mind, then how about we show them what it's like?"
Pandora's box is open, but there, fluttering on the bottom, is hope. We can't stem the flood of information that is about to wash away every vestige of the notion of privacy, but we can make sure that it washes over the rich as well as the poor, the powerful as well as the weak. I think the weak will bend before the flood, while the powerful, who have more to hide, will break.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
taken from this page: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/GIA/data.jsp
If you look at the flowchart they have, it actually takes quite a bit of effort to get information onto the system, as two of the possible four results of the system lead to the information being discarded. Check out the flowchart, and read the page - It covers a lot of important stuff.
exactly. http://www.usflag.org/us.code36.html#176. Although I'm sure you knew that.
Holy Shit! Have you read all that? Unless Little League, BSA, GSA and hundreds of others have been designated a "patriotic organization", they are all in violation for wearing flag patches.
God help all those people in D.C. who put flag decals on their cars, then later sell them. $100 fine and/or 30 days in jail. (This may only relate to any vehicle used in business, I'm still in too much shock to re-read it all.) [Title 4, Chapter 1, Paragraph 3]
Want to make & sell a flag or lapel button flag? Get a license from the Sec. of Defense for face $1,000 max. fine.
However...
"...no federal agency has the authority to issue 'official' rulings legally binding on civilians or civilian groups."
Thus they are customs, not law. Except for the D.C. thing.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
>The rest of us just have our one vote.
..."
This is the wrong attitude to have; keeping silent until election day out of cynicism of the system because the wealthy have better access than you.
Join a political organization, the ACLU and NORML could always use more members. *two organization I'm part of.
Local government: There are many opportunities to make your voice heard. *I've done a little regarding the local school system, but I hope to exploit this more
Keep in touch with your congress person: fax and phone them over issues and pending legislation. *A little ackward at first, but now I feel very comfortable calling up and saying "Yes I'm a constituent and I would like my congressman to vote against
Cyber-politics: web-based form letters, forwarding emails/links, mature discourse on poltics on web forums, etc *this is probably the most accessible way to get involved and will probably change government/citizen interaction in considerable ways in the next couple years.
I do all of the above, and yes it has its downsides, but en masse getting involved in politics is very healthy for a democracy and when real results come out of it (and they do) then it hard to justify the complete apathetic stance of 'all we get is a vote, they're in charge.' Why not become "them?"
Regardless of all the examples of cronyism and corruption you can think of, X amount of government will be little people making their voices heard. The question is do you want to be part of that X amount, thus influencing it with your views, or not?
Lastly, all of the above really doesn't take much time. I think at one time the apathetic stance could have been defended a bit more easily, but with advances in politics on the web its almost a crime not to do something as simple as point-and-click donate or point-and-click fax.
"why do we think it is important to have the nation aware of blue dresses and activities between consenting adults in private, but not important to be able to look for patterns in the behaviour of large numbers of people to find the 1 in a million dangerous types?"
Because "dangerous" can mean a lot of different things. Would George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others have been considered "dangerous" to Brittain in, say, 1770? Dangerous can mean a lot of things. Dangerous can mean someone with a revolutionary idea that could wipe out a major industry. Dangerous can be someone with information that would destroy a major political figure. What a person or group in power considers dangerous often has nothing at all to do with physical injury. George Bush considers the idea of gay marriage to be "dangerous", which is why he's considering pushing for a Constitutional amendment banning it.
The other problem is with this "patterns in the behavior" approach. What you're suggesting is that once we identify something that many terrorists have done, anyone who does those things (even if they're perfectly legal) is probably a terrorist. What this logic fails to take into account is that patterns of behavior are easily changed by those wishing to conceal who and what they are. The moment you lock onto certain habits and such, those trying to conceal themselves begin altering how they do things. You may catch a few real terrorists, but most simply fade away once again. Caught up in the middle of all this are dozens or hundreds of people who have done nothing wrong, but yet are still sitting in a holding cell being interrogated by MPs for days on end. Or maybe the MPs decide that the ones who aren't telling them all about their terrorist buddies were simply trained in how to defeat interrogation techniques, so they simply declare them "enemy combatants" and lock them away for life. Looking for a pattern of behavior assumes guilt by those fitting it. When you look down a long checklist of things to look for and you're sitting there going, "check, check, check, yep check, does that too, check..." and on and on, the only thing on your mind is, "we've got to get this terrorist bastard now."
The other problem with looking at patterns of behavior is that people will begin to figure out what government is looking for, and avoid doing those things, even if they're perfectly legal. What you end up with is a chilling effect on a number of different things, like the freedom to simply live your life the way you want to, so long as you're within the law. To have unwritten and secretive laws, which is what you're basically advocating, sounds the death knell in any Democracy. Democracy assumes an informed public, and in turn assumes a public capable of informing itself. What you, and others, are asking for is that we remove as much information as possible from the public sight, making the public less and less informed, while telling them that everything will be ok because it's being done for their own protection. From a government that has berided governments on almost every continent about not being open and transparent, to begin to close things off here simply goes to show that we're moving in the wrong direction.
"It will be very hard to do properly, but it is just plain dumb not to try."
It's impossible to do, without simply annihilating the Constitutionally-guaranteed rights of so many people that you end up giving up the very thing you're fighting to protect. Pearl Harbor, September 11th, none of it makes me feel any differently about the ideas and the ideals of our Constitution. It wasn't ever written to be something that's easy to follow. It's hard because it's right. It's hard to look at someone you just know did some horrible crime and not simply beat him to death. It's hard to not want to have the police come and arrest the guy who's on the street corner saying thing to you that go against every single thing you hold dear. It's hard to respect the right of
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."