Oh, now this is rich…

Oh, now this is rich! A story about two guys starting their own “Government Information Awareness” web site.

Annoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system [TotalTerrorist Information Awareness], 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.

And here’s an interesting feature:

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.

More power to ’em.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!