Watching them watching us

Sun, 06 Jul 2003 00:26:00 -0400
/society

OK, I‘m back now. Lots to catch up on. That was very annoying.

As predicted, here’s some citizen based pushback against the governmental monopoly on collaborative information gathering. GIA (Government Information Awareness).

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, while government has the power to know details about citizens. Our goal is develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.

This image is from their sidebar and sums it up well:

They’ve thought this through to the point of having anonymous identities - required for anonymous sources to become trustable.

The system will accommodate information of almost any type, allowing users to sort through volumes of information which would otherwise be unusable. More importantly, the system allows for people to submit any information, while retaining anonymity, but while also being identified as a consistent source.

The Boston Globe have a good write-up.

As hosting these databases becomes standardised and affordable, forking will become possible. The possibility of a fork will provide similar benefits to the ones it brings to the development of Open Source. Focused but consensual management.

One benefit our - now excessively retrictive - copyright regime may bring us is the early realisation of the importance of publically owned and licensed data.