P2P for democracy
Wired News: Downloading for Democracy
What a great idea. We can all be proactive about collecting government information.
Outragedmoderates.org, launched two weeks ago, has aggregated more than 600 government and court documents to make them available for download through the Kazaa, LimeWire and Soulseek P2P networks in the interest of making government more transparent and accountable.
[Originally posted by Kelda Vath on Govdoc-l]
July 29th, 2004 at 2:04 pm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JULY 29, 2004
CONTACT:
Thad Anderson
info@outragedmoderates.org
QUEENS, NY - The political website outragedmoderates.org announced today that it has a solution to the biggest potential pitfall that its Download For Democracy campaign faces. The problem: how to assure that the files people are downloading are authentic, when the open-ended nature of P2P networks would allow someone else to upload a fake. The solution: the md5sum, a unique 32-digit code which every file contains. Thad Anderson, who maintains outragedmoderates.org, says md5sums are “just like the VIN number on your car.”
As of last week, outragedmoderates.org’s only defense against this potential problem was to recommend that users download the documents directly from the site’s username on each network. But that ignores the very advantages that P2P’s decentralized structure brings to the table. As the tech blog Corante sarcastically pointed out: “the distributed nature of a P2P network really makes sense when you’re basically telling people to download the documents from a single, centralized provider.”
Md5sum signatures eliminate this authenticity problem, allowing the Download For Democracy campaign’s P2P component to take full advantage of P2P’s distributed model. As of today, outragedmoderates.org’s Government Document Library page provides the 32-digit md5sums for 600+ documents being offered P2P networks. The site’s How to Use P2P Networks page explains how, using free software, users can extract the md5sums of the documents they have downloaded, and then simply check the signature against the one provided on the website.
Anderson says that within forty-eight hours of the publication of Wired.com’s July 19 article “Downloading For Democracy,” advice from bloggers and programmers began pouring in on how to improve the P2P campaign. “None of these people tried to charge me a penny for their technical expertise - it’s really a display of the collaborative environment that exists in P2P networking,” says Anderson, who offered as an example the July 21 post on Brian Carver’s ShareAlike.org.
“In contrast, when I bought Microsoft XP two months ago, and called tech support just to ask a question about installing it, I had to pay for a long distance call to Washington state, and they warned me that if I called more than twice, I’d have to pay $35 for tech support.”