A new site from some folk at MIT aims to take on Bush's failing 1984-style "Total [sic] Information Awareness" programme. It's called "Government Information Awareness" and let's you the humble post stuff about the "Thought Police" in your area. The idea is based on a site developed by Chris Csikszentmihályi and Ryan McKinley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory set up in July. The two MIT researchers behind the project face one serious problem: how to protect themselves against legal action should any of the postings prove false. The answer, they say, is to borrow a technique from the underground music-swapping community. Instead of storing the data in one place, they plan to distribute it around the internet in a similar way to the notorious Napster software that got music file-sharing under way. Just like TIA, the new website, called Government Information Awareness (GIA), is designed to collect snippets of information to build a database that can later be searched to reveal patterns of suspicious behaviour. The original site was hosted on one of MIT's servers. But soon after the site was launched it had to be dramatically scaled back after being overwhelmed with traffic and because of legal worries. The researchers do not edit the content, and became worried that if any of the postings were malicious or untrue MIT could be held responsible. Sign-up here and spread the word: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/