GIA. Watching the government that watches us
This is a new project from The MIT Media Lab, who serious computer heavyweights, as well as being visionaries. The site, quite new, already has much information on it. And, as more people feed it more info, the smarter it will get!
“Government Information Awareness (GIA) is a research effort by the Computing Culture group of the MIT Media Lab. It aims to provide software and data to help citizens understand the complexities of their government.
We were motivated by the Defense Advance Research Program Administration (DARPA) program, Total Information Awareness, which seeks to gather, consolidate, and analyze information about Americans and foreigners. We see such research as possibly helpful, and probably dangerous to the democratic process.
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. Only by employing such technologies can we hope to have a government “by the people, and for the people.”