Who Will Watch the Watchers?

[Isome]

This past July, a website was launched as a proactive response to the big brother-like government program TIPS, now titled Terrorism Information Awareness, and until recently, headed by John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame. The idea is: if our government is watching and tracking our movements for "suspicious activity", who will be watching and tracking theirs?

The site is a database containing:

a list of elected officials

their backgrounds,

voting records,

campaign contributors,

public appearances,

organization affiliates,

board memberships, etc.

It also contains telephone numbers for hard-to-find "subdepartments", and complex charts illustrating the connections between an organization and the various members of a specific branch of the government.

Besides being accessible to the public, it also allows users to submit information they've found to the database. The veracity of that information will be determined by other users, who will rate it based on reliability. It's sole creator, Ryan McKinley, is philosophical about the possibility of the site being taken over by frenzied partisans who may try to flood the database with every smear and crackpot theory ever heard. His thoughts are that it's a social experiment and he'll have an interesting time watching it evolve.

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.::Government Information Awareness::.

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_{I just discovered this site recently, so if it's been shared with
the denizens of DU before, my sincere apologies.}