Briefs

MIT graduate student Ryan McKinley decided to do something - beat the government at its own game by watching the watchers.

On this July 4, after six months of programming, McKinley went live with a Web site that inverts the idea of Total Information Awareness. It's called Government Information Awareness (www.opengov.us). The premise is a simple but powerful one: If our elected officials use the latest information technologies to follow our every move and detect unusual patterns in our behavior, perhaps we should subject them to the same intense scrutiny.

Here is the full story.