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."

Ok...

[nuclear305]

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

Maybe, but this also gives the government one more reason as to why P2P is evil and should be banned, don't you think?

Bittorrent

[kyhwana]

Hmm, there's no bittorrent tracker/seed.
Does anyone have a tracker/.torrent of all the stuff? Or would be willing to host one..

National security vs. P2P.

[Confused]

I'm certain, that as soon as the first secret or confidential documents appear on the network, this will be used as pretext to apply all kind of national security and anti-terrorist laws to the network.

Then we'll see, how anonymous, secure and resilient the P2P-network really is.

As a whole, the concept is interesting, as much as watching mice baiting a cat.

flaw

[__aahlyu4518]

If people download these documents from kazaa or some other p2p network, who is to tell if the information in these documents hasn't been tampered with ? For fun or evil...

You can get weird stories into this world this way.

Concrete example of P2P's merit?

[Anita Coney]

Nearly all game demos and patches are made available through bittorrent. The game publisher saves some bandwidth and gamers don't have to sign their souls over to fileplanet.

Some may argue that Congress wouldn't consider gaming worth of protecting. But just remind Congress that gamers are a billion dollar business, and that'll pique their interest.

pre-flawed from the source

[zogger]

you can't tell, same as with the "original" document that the government produced. They could start out pre-tampered. all you can do is find enough of them and compare them to look for inconsistencies. Unless you wrote it and signed it and released, you have no idea that any random government document is accurate,or is in the same form it was originally written in,you have little to no idea if anything in it is accurrate or purposeful disinformation or just busywork or a CYA effort for some reason. None of the above. Look at the way the reasons to invade iraq were presented, as "fact", based on "intel" from "multiple credible sources". Remember the pictures of the "mobile bioweapons labs" the regime was waving around that eventually were proven to be helium weather balloon "mobile labs"? That's just one example, there are probably thousands if not millions more when you think of all the projects government has been into over all these years. Pick any subject, any topic, any government agency, any year, any regime, you can probably find a lot of screwy documents that wouldn't past the honesty criteria.

The system has been broken for a long time. I have yet to meet any civilian or military government employee, willing to talk about matters off the cuff and off the record, who isn't aware of illegal or questionable shenanigans going on, and the system never gets fixed, it just gets more complex and they get better at keeping the bad stuff hidden.

I'm a skeptic, and based on decades of looking and seeing that this vague thing called "government" is just as apt to obfuscate and lie as tell the truth and be open, I am forced to assume anything they say-or release in document form, even so called "leaked" documents-should be treated with a high degree of incredulity. So the best you can do is compare it with some known data, and check multiple and diverse sources.

Re:Hrm...

[Evil Adrian]

Um, why can't you just post stuff to a web site? Why do you need p2p to post documents?

Re:Ernest Miller wrote about this...

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be true, but I have yet to find a way to get the president's speeches burned to a CD so I can listen in my car. I tried Google. I tried P2P. I tried whitehouse.gov and they only provide streaming real media which is possible to "hack", but a requires running gray market software.

You would think the White House would want people to hear the state of the union, but not from Bush it seems.

Hardly a new idea

[tiltowait]

LOCKSS-DOCS [stanford.edu] and even the US GPO Access [gpoaccess.gov] have already been doing this. But I suppose that given how online government information can go poof [firstmonday.dk] or be altered [usatoday.com], this project sounds like a good idea, albeit a partisan one.

Re:That's Why It Won't Work

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Governments could trivially discredit such a channel, by having a few Winston Smyths constantly generate fake (and easily disproven) leaked documents. Articles found on P2P nets would soon have about as much credibility as random articles posted to "alt.kooks.tinfoil".

I've never understood why the government just doesn't do this anyway instead of messing around with classification systems. A good example would he the current war- how could you possibly endanger troop movement information if the newspapers have 15 different locations for any given soldier at any given time? Information Overload works.

Hi, I'm the guy who made outragedmoderates.org

[Thad Anderson]

I wanted to thank everyone for your comments, and address a couple issues.

1) BITTORRENT: Due to a number of emails regarding this, I'm dropping Kazaa and going with Bittorrent. I'll have this set up by the end of the week, possibly earlier.

2) RELIABILITY OF DOCUMENTS: Tonight I will finish synchronizing the names of documents offered via P2P with the names given on the Government Document Library page. Once that is done, if you've downloaded documents online, you'll be able to verify the documents by checking them against the PDF provided by the original source (say, the NRDC or the House Committee on Gov't Reform). The only surefire way I can confirm that you are downloading a reliable document is if you are downloading it directly from my usernames (provided on the Download For Democracy page). Also note that the filenames of all files will include the source. As I mentioned earlier, I'm working all the kinks out of this tonight.

3) ON THIS USE'S EFFECT ON P2P OVERALL: As some people here have pointed out, none of the documents on my site are truly "secret" - I'm not breaking new documents. I consider the site's job to be one of an aggregator (and yes, I use that term because of my obsession with Google News). Anyway, considering that these documents have been made available by other sources - sources that have a degree of credibility that I have not built yet - I don't anticipate that this usage could have a negative effect on P2P. I'm never going to post anything that is not from a major media outlet, a legal or academic source, or the government.

Thanks for your interest, comments, and advice, and keep checking back over the next couple of weeks - the P2P campaign will be improving in terms of the networks used, the number of documents, and the ability to verify documents.

Thad Anderson
outragedmoderates.org

Client / Server is only defined at layer 4

[anti-NAT]

Even my home network could be described as peer to peer as I have no server for 4 client machines.

Its interesting you say that. Client / Server is really only defined at the transport layer or layer 4, and here is why :

• Ethernet is a peer-to-peer protocol - a device sending or receiving an ethernet frame is no different from any other, which makes it a peer
• IP is (or was designed to be) a peer-to-peer protocol - a device sending or receiving an IP packet is no different from any other, which makes it a peer.

What makes a particular device a "client" or a "server" ? Only the applications running on it, and where it matters in the context of TCP/IP is either the UDP or TCP ports the applications are using.

However, even that doesn't really work. What if you are configuring a "web server". To test it out, you fire up a web browser on the same box. Now the box is running both the web server and web client, so is it stil a "server", or is a "client", or is it both a client and a server ?

A point about why I clarified IP as being designed, but not necessarily a peer to peer protocol - NAT. NAT breaks the "equally a sender or receiver" property of IP. This property is one of the ones that have made the Internet what it is today - if you had an IP connection, and an IP address, you used to be able run up a web server, irrespective of any up stream devices. In other words, you were in complete control of the decision to make available a service to the network.

With deployment of NAT, you don't have as much, and depending on your environment, a lot less flexibility in making that "service providing" decision. Groups like RIAA and MPAA are quite happy with this, as they want a "broadcast" only style network, where home users can't deploy their own, possibly competing, services. NAT is the technology that will facilitate that.

There are a lot of other technology limitations that NAT causes, which are fundamentally side effects of violating the "equally a sender or a receiver" property of IP. Here is Keith Moore's list - Things that NATs break [utk.edu]