See-Through Society

Introduction

Governments like to think they’re in control. Especially in times of crisis, they try hard to portray an image of being one step ahead of their enemies, wanting us to think they are able to take decisive action that will solve problems once and for all. Since 9/11 in particular, western governments have reasserted their commitment to monitoring the movements, conversations and keystrokes of anyone they suspect of posing a threat to national security. One of the most high profile examples of this has been the US Government’s proposed Total (later renamed ‘Terrorism’) Information Awareness (TIA) scheme created by DARPA . Ambitious in scope, one of projects stated aims is “to create a counter-terrorism information system that increases information coverage by an order of magnitude.”

The TIA project quickly sparked controversy and it didn’t take long for a response to the idea. Government Information Awareness (GIA) is a website that allows anyone to post and retrieve information about members of the executive, legislature, judiciary and senior executives from US companies . Set up by a group at MIT’s Media Lab, it plays the numbers game, believing that millions of eyes can outperform the efforts and resources of a few thousand experts. Their stated goal is to, “develop a technology which empowers citizens to form a sort of intelligence agency; gathering, sorting, and acting on information they gather about the government.”

This