Website turns tables on government officials

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).

business.boston.com...

Its about F u cken time dammit, All these gov't internet officials do is get a hard on watching people do their own stuff.

But maybe its for the best.

Im conflicted on this one

[Edited on 7/5/2003 by FoxStriker]

Im 100% for it. Hell, they should make every scrap of information public about these people. It is just using the exact same criteria on public officials as they are using on John Q. Public.

They are screwing us, so screw them!

opengov.media.mit.edu...


"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both."
- James Madison (Fourth President of the United States)
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I LOVE IT! i am so proud of being born and raised and educated in BOSTON TOWN!

TUT TUT!!!!!!