Have you spied on your government today? Using some of the same database techniques the federal government is employing in its Total… er, Terrorist Information Awareness system, some bright folks at MIT have created the Open Government Information Awareness site. GIA is a database of information about individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the US government. It’s a bottom-up approach to keeping the government accountable, and it already contains some great information, including who contributed funds to get elected officials into office.
One of the more interesting aspects of the project is that it automatically scrapes C-SPAN for images of government figures, and it records everything that occurs on both channels of the national public-affairs network.
