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

I will love this plan...

[Valdrax]

I will love this plan more than you can imagine if they can find a way to make it easy to upload information in such a fashion that it's organized and easy to find. One of the main reasons I gave up on FreeNet was the nigh impossibility of finding new and interesting content. If they could fix this, I think it would be a great thing for increasing government accountability.

technical details

[dilvie]

I'd like to see more technical details. How does the posting work? This model would be different from a normal data-driven website where PHP and a DBMS could reside on a central server and retrieve information. Will the server at MIT be a P2P client that gathers posts from clients together on the fly for each http request?

Anybody have more info? Maybe I'm just blind, but I don't see any links to technical info on the site itself.

Finally, a resource for the little people

[defile]

No Total Government Awareness program would be complete without chronicling information on every single police officer, district attorney, etc.

Imagine how hard it would be for police to get anything done when it's public knowledge that they beat their wives, run every single red light they've ever come across (see video), and go to "massage parlors" for hours at a time (maybe to meet up with their congressmen).

Kill two birds with one stone

[ralphclark]

Why don't they just write up the allegations in the form of a song (popular music, i.e. "folk" music, *used* to be used to transmit stories after all) and stick it out on kazaa etc.

Angry music and properly satirical lyrics ... hmm, that *would* be an improvement on the usual dull droning on and on about sex like 90% of the crap the listening public has to endure.

Like I say, kill two birds with one stone.

Simple solution

[Cat_Byte]

Why not just move the site offshore & hire foreigners to maintain it from anonymous submissions? It seems to be the answer for everything else and CEO's love it.