MIT Researchers Turn Tables on the Government
"Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials," reports The Boston Globe.
"The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials -- reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy."
"Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, and graduate student Ryan McKinley created the Government Information Awareness (GIA) project as a response to the US government's Total Information Awareness program (TIA)."
In "Total Information Awareness for the Ages" Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology studies, writes: "An aggressive TIA project will threaten privacy and chill healthy civil disobedience. Ironically, the project could also increase security risks. Even the Pentagon's resources are limited: Most people are not terrorists, and it can be a costly diversion to attempt to monitor the torrent of chatter that will be generated by this misguided program. Because terrorists will resemble ordinary people, TIA inevitably means magnifying-glass surveillance of ordinary folks, wasting more time, all in a vicious, misdirected circle."
http://www.cato.org/dispatch/07-07-03d.html
