WITH the demise last week of the Bush administration's controversial Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) program to monitor everyone in the US, citizens now have a chance to get their own back. A website to be launched later this year will allow people to post information about the activities of government organisations, officials and the judiciary.

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. It is based on a site that Chris Csikszentmihályi and Ryan McKinley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory set up in July. That site (http://opengov.media.mit.edu) encourages members of the public to post information about organisations, officials and politicians, such as their business links and the source of their campaign donations. 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.

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