Using P2P To Make Gov't Documents Easy To Find

Trinition writes "Kim Zetter wrote for Wired News that "While legislators in Washington work to outlaw peer-to-peer networks, one website is turning the peer-to-peer technology back on Washington to expose its inner, secretive workings." For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P."

Not so much secret as hard to find

[Mant]

The site doesn't actually link to anything secret, it is all available to the public. What it does do is make it very easy to find, particulalry compared to getting this stuff of government websites.

What does it matter...?

[Glock27]

When the government can use reasons like this [msn.com] to avoid releasing the data in the first place.

The mind boggles...

By the way, isn't this type of thing the raison d'etre for Freenet - how many Freenet nodes are up these days? Any DHS visits to Freenet node operators/sites?

Concrete examples?

[erroneus]

You're kidding right? How about software distribution? Even though there is lots of software being distributed that shouldn't be, there is a lot of free software out there that is perfectly okay to share that way. Many people get their latest [favorite_linux_distro] ISO images this way. It's very legitimate and has been going on long enough to show it's not an exception to the rule at all.

Maybe the poster didn't think it through when he made the assertion, "For once, we have a concrete example to point to..." P2P is quite legitimate.

what about google

[dncsky1530]

we all love google, however their search technology allows any one to find out anything about the government. one of the special searchs primarily searches US government [google.com] documents. Not to mention peoples personal information [google.com] can be found just as easily.
Please don't get me wrong, I love google, and use it, and I especially enjoy these types of searches

Re:flaw

[alex_ware]

with bittorent an MD5 sum of the file is held on each peer and if one doesnt add up he is a bad peer stoping tampering

Re:what about google

[PhilHibbs]

Search Uncle Sam [google.com] for "il duce" and you get this:

Mr. Waxman. I only have another paragraph. And as in 1982, the administration is once again taking its cues from industry. While industry lobbyists are asked what they would do if they were Il Duce, environmental groups, the States and the public are shut out of the process.

Re:Ok...

[TyrranzzX]

Peer to peer networks often remind me of one of my favorite bible verses (hey, it may be corny but :P);

"Rev.6: 2 And I saw, and behold, a white horse; and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him and he went forth conquering and to conquer. "

That verse reminds me of peer to peer networks because the white horse represents truth and purity and that truth goes forth and conquers unstoppably; once a file hits a peer to peer network, and a few people find out and begin telling their friends, there's no stopping it. I put out an image file that was named to spread a year ago, and stopped sharing it about 4 or so months ago; it's still on gnutella on around 500 hosts last I checked. Just look at what happened to diebold's emails, heh. You can STILL find them on gnutella.

Once a government file hits the network, and it gets posted in a news story, you can kiss your control of that information goodbye. The entertaining part is that the governemnts can't stop it; isp's have tried, colleges have tried, I'v even seen powerpoints of companies that want to stop p2p traffic on their network but can't and try to talk it over with their people to find a way to do so.

there are plenty of legal P2P

[asv108]

Networks and research projects out there today. Bittorrent is probably one most widely use protocols for public domain content distribution. Furthur [furthurnet.com] is a 100% legal P2P music sharing network for bands that allow taping.

In the academic community, there are quite a few interesting projects going on. I work on a project called LionShare [psu.edu], which is integrating services like authentication, authorization, and directory in to a federated P2P network.

Other Examples

[Bob9113]

For once, we have a concrete example to point to when citing the merits of P2P.

Let me offer a few others that have been around for a while:
- Distributing FLOSS. For example, Linux [tlm-project.org].
- Distributing music with the copyright holder's permission. For example, eTree [etree.org].
- Distributing internally developed software to employees in a large enterprise. For example, LANDesk [landesk.com] and Marimba [marimba.com] use peer to peer distribution.