Volition

If there is one good thing to have come out of the United States, it is the MIT Media Lab. And they've just done it again. Government Information Awareness collects information about the "individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America." It then makes this information available to the general public.

GIA is a reaction to the steady erosion of the rights and privacy that US citizens have seen since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center buildings, a few years ago. In particular, it is a reaction against the Total Information Awareness program set up by the US Department of Defence's Information Awareness Office. The TIA program is researching ways to collect every single bit of electronic information about US citizens (and people world-wide, no doubt) and to store this information forever, making it available only to US law enforcement agencies, spooks, computer crackers and crooked politicians. Clearly this sucks and while most of the general US public do not seem to care, luckily some do. Luckily for the US public and luckily for the rest of the rest of the world as well.

On the entertaining side, the TIA initally sported a rather scary logo but sadly the specter of the TIA peering over the entire world (and specifcially Europe and the Middle East) turned out to be a really bad public-relations exercise and has been taken down. They then decided the program's name was not very friendly either, so now it is called Terrorism Information Awareness program. Ah! It is helping fight the War on Terrorism™, it must be good.