Posted on 7-7-2003
MIT
Launches Watch on US Government
System to empower an informed citizenry, By Egan Orion,
5 July 2003
http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance,
and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves
with the power knowledge gives." - James Madison
Fittingly enough, Wired chose yesterday --
July 4, the US Independence Day -- to run the story that the
MIT Media Lab has built a fully web-enabled system promoting
Government Information Awareness.
The MIT system's name consciously echoes
the DARPA Terrorist Information Awareness programme. That's
a comprehensive domestic snooping plan meant to collect and
collate every obtainable scrap of data about everyone in the
US population, as betrayed by the name initially given the proposal:
Total Information Awareness. It is a chillingly Orwellian departure.
MIT's system is intended to counter-balance
the US government's grasp of information about its citizens
by providing them with effective ways to gather, organize and
share information about governmental activities.
It will hold data about elected and appointed
officials at all levels of government, political campaign contributions
and legislative action (and the implicit links between those
that now so corrupt American politics), regulatory affairs,
defence contracts -- everything people can learn.
Given that the Democratic party -- the nominal
opposition to the current US Administration -- is widely viewed
in the US as subservient, impotent and co-opted by the same
big-money influence peddling driving the ruling Republican agenda,
such a countervailing populist tool seems timely
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