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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?
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
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.
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."
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.
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