Information Generation, the Next Freedom of Information Act

This is an interesting story from the same article. It illustrates the fundamental failing of capitalism’s authoritarian information hording in light of the mass participatory internet-based knowledge generation. It’s often easier to generate and combine information, than to attempt to get it from authorities.

(A) project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It's a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there's… (a crime) you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information… "Don't go there. That street corner is dangerous…” But it's something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they're certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now."

Image: http://www.wikicrimes.org/