Open Government Information Awareness Ryan McKinley B.A., Computer Science &Visual Arts University of California at San Diego, June 2000 Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology August 2003 @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved Author: Ryan McKinley Program in Media Arts and Sciences August 20, 2003 Certified by: Chris Csikszentmihalyi Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Thesis Supervisor ROTCH Accepted by: Dr. Andew B. Lippman Chair, Departmental Committee on Graduate Studies Program in Media Arts and Sciences MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SEP 2 9 2003 LIBRARIES 2 Open Government Information Awareness Ryan McKinley Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, on August 20, 2003 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences. Abstract "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, In the United States, there is a widening gap between a citizen's and a people who mean to be their own ability to monitor his or her government and the government's governors, must arm themselves with ability to monitor a citizen. Average citizens have limited access the power knowledge gives. A popular to important government records, while available information is government without popular information or often illegible. Meanwhile, the government's eagerness and means the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to to oversee a citizen's personal activity is rapidly increasing. As the a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both." government broadens internal surveillance, and collaborates with - James Madison private institutions to access data on the public, it is crucial that we maintain a symmetry of accountability. If we believe the United States should be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" it is of central importance to provide citizens with the power to oversee their government. At least as much effort should be spent building tools to facilitate citizens supervising their government as tools to help the government monitor individuals. In this thesis, I discuss the motivations, design, and implementation of Government Information Awareness, a citizen run database on our government. Fundamentally, this system relies on an organizational structure that accepts information from an anonymous population, stores it, and represents it with enough context to maintain legibility. My work in this thesis is offering a framework for a system that could help citizens pool their collective knowledge, and through this process, create a more informed public capable of self-rule. 4 Open Government Information Awareness Ryan McKinley Chris Csikszentmihalyi Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Fukutake Career Development Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology 6Uess 6 Open Government Information Awareness Ryan McKinley Dan Ariely Ass ie Professor of Media and Management Science assachusetts Institute of Technology Thesi Readr - I Thesis Reader -V 8 Open Government Information Awareness Ryan McKinley Joseph Dumit Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science &Technology Studies Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thes s Reader 10 Acknowledgements an incomplete list... i am afraid. Mom, Dad, Ali, Greg, Geoff... Gian Pangaro Hayes Raffel Jamie Rollins David Steinmiller Simon Greenwold Michelle Hulbinka Simon Shiessl Saoirce Higgins Kelly Dobson James Patten Megan Galbraith Leo Burd Robert Cook Stacy Slotnik Brian Whitman Justin Manor Igor Vamos Richard Pell Jason Taylor Ben Recht Tad Hirsch Esra Ozkan Parul Vora Michael Smith-Welch Linda Peterson John DiFrancesco Jim Youll Jon Ferguson The Cube (anyone listing to the music) - particularly Roz & Mitch. Mi familia Fernandez Ostolaza Balagu6 Chris. wow. thank you. Aisling Geraldine Mary Kelliher. the best. Contents 1. Introduction.......................................14 2. Background........................................23 2.1- Lessons from Madison.................23 2.2 - Political Action............................................25 2.2.1 - Mark Lombardi (1951-2000)............25 2.2.2 - They Rule......................................28 2.2.3 - OpenSecrets.org...........................29 2.2.4 - FirstGov.gov..................................32 2.2.5 - The New York Times....................33 2.2.6 - Conclusion.....................................36 2.3 - Technical ..................................................... 36 2.3.1 - Semantic Web...............................37 2.3.2 - Trust systems............................................40 2.4 - Conclusions.................................................40 3. Implementation................................ 45 3.1 - System Ethics and Guidelines...........46 3.2 - Data Model.................................................49 3.3 - Circle of Trust / Area of Concern...............50 3.4 - Components...............................................51 3.4.1 - GovDatum.....................................52 3.4.2 - DataStore.........................53 3.4.3 - CitizenDB......................................54 3.4.4 - Extensions..................57 3.4.5 - Perspective: Web Interface.........................58 3.4.6 - Aggregation .................................. 62 3.4.7 - Listener - CodeOrange.................63 3.5 - July 4th (oh my)..........................................64 3.5.1 - Caching..........................................66 3.5.2 - Load Balancing.............................66 3.5.3 - Network Data Source...............................67 3.6 - Conclusions.................................................67 4. Evaluation.........................................69 4.1 - System Logs.....................................................70 4.2 - User Survey.................................................71 4.2.1 - Demographics...............................73 4.2.2 - Correlations .................................. 86 4.2.3 - Survey conclusions..........86 4.3 - Dialog - media, coverage...............87 4.4 - conclusions....................................91 5. Future Work............................93 5.1 - Development Community.............93 5.2 - Distribute Risk.............................94 5.3 - Data Gathering Campaign............96 5.4 - Conclusions....................................97 6. References...............................98 7. Appendix..................................101 A - MIT Press Release..............................101 B - AP Article............................................103 C - Boston Globe Article.......................o6 D - Washington Post Article....................109 E - Survey Part 1.......................................112 F - Survey Part 2.......................................114 G - Professions..........................................117 H - No Vote..........................................118 I - Influences.............................................122 J - Important Information.......................128 K - What Information..............................134 L - News Sources......................................138 1 - Introduction Since January of 2001, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in government secrecy, decreased access to public records, and the most ambitious effort to build a centralized intelligence agency since J. Edgar Hoover's FBI under the McCarthy era. Between February and May of 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney held meetings with as many as 400 people from 150 corporations, trade associations, environmental groups and labor unions, to devise a new energy policy. The task force report recommended a dramatic increase in drilling for oil and gas, construction of many more power plants, and reviving the nuclear power program. In May of 2001, the General Accounting Office (GAO), the auditing and investigative arm of Congress, requested to know who was involved in the meetings, and what were their criteria for determining the nation's energy policy. Cheney's response has been that he requires secrecy to be able to solicit council from the country's most important individuals and organizations, while the GAO argues that they need access to this information in order to assess accountability - particularly considering the ENRON scandal and Cheney's former post as the CEO of the Halliburton Corporation. All requests have been denied. Eventually the GAO sued Cheney, but the case was thrown out of court. On October 12, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a memorandum to the heads of all departments and agencies that overrode the Department of Justice Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) policy instituted in 1993. In this memo, he urges agencies to carefully consider "institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information" [Ashcroft, 2001]. Later he states, "When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records" [Ashcroft, 2001]. The Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. It provides a mechanism for any American to investigate the government's