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Using P2P To Make Gov't Documents Easy To Find
Trinition writes "Kim Zetter wrote for Wired News that "While legislators in Washington work to outlaw peer-to-peer networks, one website is turning the peer-to-peer technology back on Washington to expose its inner, secretive workings." For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P."
Wouldn't "exposing secretive inner workings" make the US government want to shut down p2p even more?
"For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P."
Maybe, but this also gives the government one more reason as to why P2P is evil and should be banned, don't you think?
Hmm, there's no bittorrent tracker/seed.
Does anyone have a tracker/.torrent of all the stuff? Or would be willing to host one..
My email addy? should be easy enough.
The site doesn't actually link to anything secret, it is all available to the public. What it does do is make it very easy to find, particulalry compared to getting this stuff of government websites.
The mind boggles...
By the way, isn't this type of thing the raison d'etre for Freenet - how many Freenet nodes are up these days? Any DHS visits to Freenet node operators/sites?
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Over here in the UK, the government uses the more reliable low-tech approach of real paper documents available from laybys to spread information about its secret inner workings.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
I'm certain, that as soon as the first secret or confidential documents appear on the network, this will be used as pretext to apply all kind of national security and anti-terrorist laws to the network.
Then we'll see, how anonymous, secure and resilient the P2P-network really is.
As a whole, the concept is interesting, as much as watching mice baiting a cat.
" For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P."
Um...What about Bittorrent? Last time I checked it was the best way to download large files like Linux distros. Plus it makes it better to have more people downloading not worse, a big problem for huge servers with popular files. I can remember it taking FOREVER to get my first fresh Linux dostro downloaded
I am guessing this is one site that will have reason to be thankful for being ./ed.
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
If people download these documents from kazaa or some other p2p network, who is to tell if the information in these documents hasn't been tampered with ? For fun or evil...
You can get weird stories into this world this way.
You're kidding right? How about software distribution? Even though there is lots of software being distributed that shouldn't be, there is a lot of free software out there that is perfectly okay to share that way. Many people get their latest [favorite_linux_distro] ISO images this way. It's very legitimate and has been going on long enough to show it's not an exception to the rule at all.
Maybe the poster didn't think it through when he made the assertion, "For once, we have a concrete example to point to..." P2P is quite legitimate.
we all love google, however their search technology allows any one to find out anything about the government. one of the special searchs primarily searches US government documents. Not to mention peoples personal information can be found just as easily.
Please don't get me wrong, I love google, and use it, and I especially enjoy these types of searches
Some other comments are saying "But they will just want to ban it all the more!"
In fact, if we use P2P to broadcast all kinds of government dirty laundry, their attempts to ban p2p will look like an attempt to crack down on freedom of information.
It could very well be that free flow of information, anonymous and universally available, is a huge reason why world governments don't like p2p. Of course, the record industry's huge donations to Orrin Hatch don't hurt any either.
I say dump Cryptome onto p2p sites. Dump whatever you can. We have a loophole right now; better try and widen it while we can. We might even give pause to some of the criminals on capitol hill while we're at it.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
I'm downloading AGrikulturalPolicyNOCD+crakz.zip right now.
Nearly all game demos and patches are made available through bittorrent. The game publisher saves some bandwidth and gamers don't have to sign their souls over to fileplanet.
Some may argue that Congress wouldn't consider gaming worth of protecting. But just remind Congress that gamers are a billion dollar business, and that'll pique their interest.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
...at The Importance Of... - basically he makes the very sound point that this obfuscated distribution system is entirely unnecessary. All US Government documents are public domain (non-copyrighted) so any web site could put them up for static download without fear of DMCA attacks. It would make them far easier to find just by using Google. Instead "I go to the outragedmoderates.org website, go to the "Government Document Library," look up the documents I want, ignore the fact that I could download them from the website, start a P2P program, enter a search for the document name and/or outragedmoderates.org user name, and then download the documents, remembering that if I don't download the documents from outragedmoderates.org I might be getting inauthentic files."
This is exactly what so many people should be doing in the open-source and free-software communities. We need to prove that many of these tools are only considered "evil" because they take away money from corporations. They are not, by themselves, tools of the devil.
This type of idea can be applied to many more things which can encourage social reform. Not just spreading information and accessing it easily (P2P and the Internet are doing just fine), but with opening tools and software/hardware solutions into the public domain. We need to figure out a way to develop software without fear of piracy (by making it free), and which still compensates those who spend thousands of hours toiling over it.
We should apply this idea at all levels. Move out of the dark realms of piracy and software cracks, and prove that we really DO have better ideas than the current industry.
-Dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
"It took Anderson about four hours and 2,000 mouseclicks to download more than 13,000 documents related to Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force" 2,000 clicks for 13,000+ documents?? via an html interface.. now that impresses me.. i map ~ 1 click : 1 document "Pornography, for example, had a role in pushing broadband into more homes." just giving you guys a reason to rtfa
"The more you know, the less sure you are." - Voltaire
you can't tell, same as with the "original" document that the government produced. They could start out pre-tampered. all you can do is find enough of them and compare them to look for inconsistencies. Unless you wrote it and signed it and released, you have no idea that any random government document is accurate,or is in the same form it was originally written in,you have little to no idea if anything in it is accurrate or purposeful disinformation or just busywork or a CYA effort for some reason. None of the above. Look at the way the reasons to invade iraq were presented, as "fact", based on "intel" from "multiple credible sources". Remember the pictures of the "mobile bioweapons labs" the regime was waving around that eventually were proven to be helium weather balloon "mobile labs"? That's just one example, there are probably thousands if not millions more when you think of all the projects government has been into over all these years. Pick any subject, any topic, any government agency, any year, any regime, you can probably find a lot of screwy documents that wouldn't past the honesty criteria.
The system has been broken for a long time. I have yet to meet any civilian or military government employee, willing to talk about matters off the cuff and off the record, who isn't aware of illegal or questionable shenanigans going on, and the system never gets fixed, it just gets more complex and they get better at keeping the bad stuff hidden.
I'm a skeptic, and based on decades of looking and seeing that this vague thing called "government" is just as apt to obfuscate and lie as tell the truth and be open, I am forced to assume anything they say-or release in document form, even so called "leaked" documents-should be treated with a high degree of incredulity. So the best you can do is compare it with some known data, and check multiple and diverse sources.
Exactly. It's not "their own information" because there is no "they". It's *our* own information; we just hired some people to take care of it for us. (Yes, I do remember that there's a world outside of the U.S. borders, but this story ain't about you.)
If some of our hirelings sometimes act as if they don't see things that way, all the more reason for the rest of us to make sure that we act as though we do.
"This is EXACTLY why I'm voting for Busch in the Fall."
/. poll:
:-)
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Your pick for President of the United States:
o Busch
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o Blatz
o Guinness
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Using P2P To Make Gov't Documents Easy To Find,
Using Gov't To Make P2P Operators Hard To Find
In the academic community, there are quite a few interesting projects going on. I work on a project called LionShare, which is integrating services like authentication, authorization, and directory in to a federated P2P network.
Ok, reasons to use P2P:
Software downloads - I get all of my Linux ISOs from Gnutella and BitTorrent
Photographs - Yes, 99% of what's shared on Gnuttella in the way of images is porn. That 1% can be DAMN interesting.
Video feeds - Back when the towers fell, the Internet was slow, but usable. Major news sites were effectively dead, though. Gnutella was klunky then compared to now, but was still your best bet for getting video of what was going on.
Rare music - bands that have yet to make a name. Rare recordings from over seas that have never been for sale in the US. There are just so many GOOD things to listen to after you wade through the mainstream garbage.
P2P is a healthy, vibrant community of free speach. That means that a lot of the speach is the sort of thing you'd hear out of the average high school student, true, but that doesn't make the rare, considered speech any less valuable!
Ah, I sea buy yur speling that you too ar a produkt of the know child left behind.
For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P.
Let me offer a few others that have been around for a while:
- Distributing FLOSS. For example, Linux.
- Distributing music with the copyright holder's permission. For example, eTree.
- Distributing internally developed software to employees in a large enterprise. For example, LANDesk and Marimba use peer to peer distribution.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Drop me a postcard from Guantanamo, "Thad"... :)
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Some years ago, my father and I secured the public printed documents on the manageement of the State of Alabama Board of Education and the various schools in the state. We recompiled the data by hand typing into a database and extracted much valuable management information. When presented to Mary Jane Caylor (State Board of Ed.) she was dumbfounded. She said with much excitement, "Where did you get this data!" It seemed that she had requested from the Bureaucrats this data in this form and they had told her it was impossible to give it to her.
Making a long story short this data was used with the obvious suggestions to improve schools and their management nation wide. Schools are now evaluated by the development of their students. Unfortunately we have not extended this evaluation into the direct compensation and tenure of teachers.
The point here is that data available on paper may as well be locked in a safe regrards solving problems. This P2P use and posting of all public documents on the Internet is the key to management of governmnt. It is like taking the hot sun and shining it on the snow burrying our freedom. It melts it away!
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
LOCKSS-DOCS and even the US GPO Access have already been doing this. But I suppose that given how online government information can go poof or be altered, this project sounds like a good idea, albeit a partisan one.
Governments could trivially discredit such a channel, by having a few Winston Smyths constantly generate fake (and easily disproven) leaked documents. Articles found on P2P nets would soon have about as much credibility as random articles posted to "alt.kooks.tinfoil".
I've never understood why the government just doesn't do this anyway instead of messing around with classification systems. A good example would he the current war- how could you possibly endanger troop movement information if the newspapers have 15 different locations for any given soldier at any given time? Information Overload works.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I wanted to thank everyone for your comments, and address a couple issues.
1) BITTORRENT: Due to a number of emails regarding this, I'm dropping Kazaa and going with Bittorrent. I'll have this set up by the end of the week, possibly earlier.
2) RELIABILITY OF DOCUMENTS: Tonight I will finish synchronizing the names of documents offered via P2P with the names given on the Government Document Library page. Once that is done, if you've downloaded documents online, you'll be able to verify the documents by checking them against the PDF provided by the original source (say, the NRDC or the House Committee on Gov't Reform). The only surefire way I can confirm that you are downloading a reliable document is if you are downloading it directly from my usernames (provided on the Download For Democracy page). Also note that the filenames of all files will include the source. As I mentioned earlier, I'm working all the kinks out of this tonight.
3) ON THIS USE'S EFFECT ON P2P OVERALL: As some people here have pointed out, none of the documents on my site are truly "secret" - I'm not breaking new documents. I consider the site's job to be one of an aggregator (and yes, I use that term because of my obsession with Google News). Anyway, considering that these documents have been made available by other sources - sources that have a degree of credibility that I have not built yet - I don't anticipate that this usage could have a negative effect on P2P. I'm never going to post anything that is not from a major media outlet, a legal or academic source, or the government.
Thanks for your interest, comments, and advice, and keep checking back over the next couple of weeks - the P2P campaign will be improving in terms of the networks used, the number of documents, and the ability to verify documents.
Thad Anderson
outragedmoderates.org
Even my home network could be described as peer to peer as I have no server for 4 client machines.
Its interesting you say that. Client / Server is really only defined at the transport layer or layer 4, and here is why :
What makes a particular device a "client" or a "server" ? Only the applications running on it, and where it matters in the context of TCP/IP is either the UDP or TCP ports the applications are using.
However, even that doesn't really work. What if you are configuring a "web server". To test it out, you fire up a web browser on the same box. Now the box is running both the web server and web client, so is it stil a "server", or is a "client", or is it both a client and a server ?
A point about why I clarified IP as being designed, but not necessarily a peer to peer protocol - NAT. NAT breaks the "equally a sender or receiver" property of IP. This property is one of the ones that have made the Internet what it is today - if you had an IP connection, and an IP address, you used to be able run up a web server, irrespective of any up stream devices. In other words, you were in complete control of the decision to make available a service to the network.
With deployment of NAT, you don't have as much, and depending on your environment, a lot less flexibility in making that "service providing" decision. Groups like RIAA and MPAA are quite happy with this, as they want a "broadcast" only style network, where home users can't deploy their own, possibly competing, services. NAT is the technology that will facilitate that.
There are a lot of other technology limitations that NAT causes, which are fundamentally side effects of violating the "equally a sender or a receiver" property of IP. Here is Keith Moore's list - Things that NATs break
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf