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

Re-inventing the wheel?

[Noryungi]

Using a distributed P2P network? Isn't that what Freenet is all about? It also has the added bonus of offering strong encryption...

I fail to see what's new here, except the fact that it takes place in the USA.

Ugh

[Sneftel]

Oh, thank goodness! The magic of P2P will allow researchers to libel mercilessly without any fear of repercussions! Tell us again about the FREEMASONS!

When did "information wants to be free" become "information wants to be indemnified"?

Re:Ugh

[nocomment]

Doesn't this mean that anyone can post anything regardless of it being true? This bascially undermines the principal of the project, and makes the whole thing invalid. If they actually set it up that way, it's only use will be a good place to store all the predictions that come out before a macworld expo.

Rumor mill run wild.

[Hawthorne01]

Maybe it's just me, but without a system in place for fact-checking and followup, it seems to me this would quickly turn into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories of the worst sort, be they from the Right or the Left or anywhere in between.

Validity

[Boing]

Does it seem to anyone else like the GIA program is going to drown in its own chaff? I mean, if it's really supposed to be giving people "insider" information about the government, how are they going to confirm that any submission is true? Think of all the just-shy-of-slanderous commercials that air around election day... and that costs money. If people can anonymously, cheaply spread whatever "information" they want about their least favorite candidate, we'll never know whether anything we read is accurate.

and you thought the RIAA is behaving badly?

[beorach]

how do you think the government (or the loosely attached to the government) would react to such information being distributed? In the beginning it would be easy to target the small amount of computers/people possessing the information. any p2p network is only as good as how wide the file ditribution runs. Who would be willing to take the risks?

Solution looking for a problem?

[kawika]

What makes them think that they would somehow be responsible if they were to do something simple and straightforward like a discussion forum? The high court has already ruled on several of these kind of cases and free speech won. For example, they struck down the CDA and they also said that Yahoo didn't have to rat out an anonymous Yahoo Groups poster.

Why use an obscure technology? That will have more of a chilling effect on active participation than any other factor.

how to protect themselves...

[YrWrstNtmr]

how to protect themselves against legal action should any of the postings prove false.

And why, exactly, should they (whomever they may be) be immune from legal action should they post falsified data?

Check your sources before distributing some random bit of gossip.

Use anonymous reputations to confirm data

[lawpoop]

It seems to me that there's several ways to confirm the validity of the data.

One, use anonymous, public keys. Create a reputation system where anybody gives a personal rating to anyone else. (Sorta like Slashdot "friend or foe"). Reputations build over time, and some sources will be more reliable than others. You can decide who you will trust to tell you what's going on. You can rate sources, and you can see how others rate sources.

Two, use what's called 'triangulation' in interview journalism. If three or more 'independant' sources agree on a datum, is more likely to be true than if just one says it's true. (if there is some kind of sinister collaboration to hack the triangulation system, fall back on the reputation system).