Website turns tables on government officials

July 6, 2003 | Source: Boston Globe

MIT researchers have created the Government Information Awareness (GIA) project as a response to the US government’s Total Information Awareness program.

Internet users can submit their own intelligence reports on government officials; they will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy. Software similar to Google also gleans information from Internet sites that store information about politicians. Users can also access information compiled from various real-time sources such as CSPAN.

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