GIA to use P2P to Avoid Litigaton

DrMorpheus writes "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."

Comments

Federal Judge information

[zenray]

Good Luck in getting any FOI information about Federal Judges. Even though they are subject to the same public information disclosure laws that everybody eles in the federal governemt there is one aspect that is different. To insure their safety all FOI requests about them are highly documented about the requester and then vetted by the Judge before any information is released. In other words 'they' know about all requests for information and the specific Judge controls whether the information is released or not.

Full Circle

[Afty0r]

If you are willing to wait long enough, history repeats itself.

Now, the citizens of the USA (academics at that) are having to resort to using the tactics of the underground to disseminate information about the conduct, actions and transgressions of their government for fear of persecution.

There was a time when people respected the US for its stance on individual rights, freedoms and the ideals of America.

While not a direct, damning criticism, one of the HUGE indicators of a state entering into an oppressive regime is when academics are not valued, and when academics are not free to openly discuss, read and disseminate ideas.
This has already happened in the US... is this an indicator of what is to come, or just an anomaly?

Demo site available at MIT

[Jonah Hex]

It is based on a site that Chris Csikszentmihalyi 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 demo site mentioned above is pretty damn cool, even offers monitoring of C-SPAN/C-SPAN2 as well as a "robot" that watches and records appearances by "people, pundits, or politicians who have recently been entered into our facial database". Hopefully the system looks this polished when it moves to being a P2P network!

Jonah Hex

Re:Freenet

[Troed]

Uhm.

*) Install Freenet
*) Browse to localhost:8888

Done. What's unuseable?