[R-G] Website turns tables on government officials

[Tim Murphy]

Boston Globe

Website turns tables on government officials
By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 7/4/2003

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.


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.

"It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency," said Chris Csikszentmihalyi,
assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.

He 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).

Revealed last year, TIA seeks to track possible terrorist activity by
analyzing vast amounts of information stored in government and private
databases, such as credit card data. The system would use this information
to analyze the actions of millions of people, in an effort to spot patterns
that could indicate a terrorist threat.

News of the plan outraged civil libertarians and prompted Congress to set
limits on the scope of such activity. The Defense Department then renamed
the program Terrorist Information Awareness, to ease public concern.

But the controversy gave McKinley the idea for the GIA project. "If total
information exists," he said, "really the same effort should be spent to
make the same information at the leadership level at least as transparent --
in my opinion, more transparent."

McKinley worked with Csikszentmihalyi to design the GIA system. It's partly
based on technology used to create Internet indexes such as Google. Software
crawls around Internet sites that store large amounts of information about
politicians. These include independent political sites like opensecrets.org,
as well as sites run by government agencies. McKinley created software that
ferrets out the useful data from these sites, and loads it into the GIA
database. The result is a one-stop research site for basic information on
key officials.

The site also takes advantage of round-the-clock political coverage provided
by cable TV's C-Span networks. McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi use video
cameras to capture images of people appearing on C-Span, which generally
includes the names of people shown on screen. A computer program "reads"
each name, and links it to any information about that person stored in the
database. By clicking on the picture, a GIA user instantly gets a complete
rundown on all available data about that person.

The GIA site constantly displays snapshots of the people appearing on C-Span
at that moment. If there's a dossier on a particular person, clicking on the
picture brings it up. A C-Span viewer watching a live government hearing
could learn which companies have contributed to a member of Congress's
reelection campaign, before the politician had even finished speaking.

All of the information currently on the site is available from public
sources. But GIA will go one step further. Starting today, the site will
allow the public to submit information about government officials, and this
information will be made available to anyone visiting the site. No effort
will be made to verify the accuracy of the data.

This approach to Internet publishing isn't new. It resembles a method known
as Wiki, in which a website is constantly amended by visitors who contribute
new information. The best known Wiki site, www.wikipedia.org, is an online
encyclopedia created entirely by visitors who have voluntarily written
nearly 140,000 articles, on subjects ranging from astronomy to Roman
mythology. Any Wikipedia user who thinks he has spotted an error or wants to
add information can modify the article. Unlike at a standard encyclopedia
operation, there is no central authority to edit or reject articles.

The GIA approach, though, raises the possibility that people could post
libelous information, or data that unreasonably compromises a person's
privacy.

That troubles Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology & Liberty Program
of the American Civil Liberties Union. "We think that there should be some
restrictions on the publishing of personally identifiable information,
whether it involves government officials or not," he said.

But he noted that the public has a right to know some things about a
politician that would be properly kept private about an ordinary citizen.
For instance, voters have a right to know where a politician sends his
children to school, if that politician has taken a strong stand on school
vouchers.

"Do they have the right to publish every piece of data they're going to
publish?" Steinhardt asked. "It's going to depend on what they publish."

In any case, Steinhardt said, McKinley and Csikszentmihalyi have a First
Amendment right to set up the GIA project. And he said that it's a valuable
response to the government's TIA surveillance. "I assume the point of this
is, turnabout is fair play."

On a page of the GIA website, at opengov.media.mit.edu, McKinley and
Csikszentmihalyi give their answer to questions about the legitimacy of
their actions.

"Is it legal?" the site reads. "It should be."

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray at globe.com.

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