Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
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.