Chris Csikszentmihalyi

In a bid to counter the United States government’s Total Information Awareness (TIA, renamed Terrorist Information Awareness after a public outcry) program started after 9/11 and criticized by conservatives and leftists alike for an invasion of privacy, some students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have initiated GIA, or Government Information Awareness, allowing citizens to build dossiers on all government officials so that the public is informed about their executives and lawmakers.

The GIA is a research effort by the Computing Culture Group of the MIT Media Lab and aims to provide software and data to help citizens understand the complexities of their government, say Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab, and graduate student Ryan McKinley.

Quoting the nation’s founding fathers, the students believe they must have a site that would allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity, and to allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.

“In the United States, there is a widening gap between a citizen’s ability to monitor his or her government and the government’s ability to monitor a citizen,” they note in their Web site.

“Average citizens have limited access to important government records, while available information is often illegible. Meanwhile, the government’s eagerness and means to oversee a citizen’s personal activity is rapidly increasing,” they point out.

Modeled on recent government programs designed to consolidate information on individuals into massive databases, they emphasize their system does the opposite, “allowing you to scrutinize those in government.”

Citizens are able to explore data, track events, find patterns and build risk profiles, all in an effort to encourage and motivate action. “We like to think of it as a Citizen’s Intelligence Agency, giving people similar tools and technologies to those held by their government.”

The students are in the process of developing GIA and they say they have collected large amounts of information from many sources in files. The information is these files may come from the subjects themselves, in which case no source is given other than the subject. In some cases, the information is parsed from reliable sources (likeSecrets), in which case these sources are credited. They are actively soliciting other databases for inclusion, so encourage any organization with a large database to get assimilated with them.

“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,” say the Web site builders, explaining why they have launched GIA.

“We actively solicit programmers, political activists from all denominations, lawyers and others who are interested in supportingIA,” the authors say. “From subroutines to facts to coffee, we can use any assistance possible.” They have had such a flood of responses to requests for help that the system is currently unable to provide updates.