Government Information Awareness (GIA) - United States

The premise of GIA is that individual citizens have the right to know details about government, just as government has exercised the power to know details about citizens. The idea is to develop a technology that empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency that gathers, sorts, and acts on information they find out about their government.

GIA is based on a pilot website that researchers set up in July 2003. That site encourages members of the public to post information about organisations, officials, and politicians, such as their business links and the source of their campaign donations. When fully implemented, the GIA system will also present itself to users as a website, but is actually a suite of information technologies that actively peruse data, accept contributions, and post alerts. The system will accommodate various kinds of information and enable users to sort through it. In addition, the system will allow people to submit information, while retaining anonymity, but while also being identified as a consistent source.

For example, the media might get word of, and inform the public about, a political scandal that later results in the politician in question being exonerated because of a specific fact. Users will be able to poll the GIA system to see if that fact was logged and find out who contributed that fact, and when they did, without knowing their real name. They can then rank the credibility of that contributor, and ask the system to notify them if he or she makes further contributions in the future. The idea is that people can learn whether they trust or mistrust a contributor, while the contributor still retains anonymity. A further feature of the site will be that any subject of a submission - whether individual, agency, or organisation - is notified of the submission, and asked to respond. Submissions are not purged if denied; the researchers do not edit the content.

In order to protect MIT from legal action should any of the postings prove malicious or untrue, GIA will store the data not in one place but, rather, distribute it around the Internet. The website will collect pieces of information to build a database that can later be searched to reveal patterns of suspicious behaviour. On this peer-to-peer network, data can be downloaded directly from various locations.

Participatory Governance, Technology.

Organisers say they were motivated by the Defense Advance Research Program Administration (DARPA) programme, Total Information Awareness (TIA) (later renamed Terrorist Information Awareness" ), which was launched by the Bush administration to gather, consolidate, and analyse information about Americans and foreigners. Organisers saw this project, which has been discontinued, as "possibly helpful, and probably dangerous to the democratic process". GIA is a way of responding to the government's exercise of power through information.