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."

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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