CITIZENS USE INTERNET TECHNOLOGY TO FIGHT FRAUD

Source: A research professor at the University of Wits. South Africa.

TO FIGHT corruption, we need to harness the power of citizens and the power of the internet. In India, a site called IPaidABribe.com asks citizens who have been forced to pay a bribe to record it on the site anonymously if they wish. In fact, they can also report incidents in which they have not had to pay a bribe – and they want to praise an honest public servant.

The site collates the information, analyses and maps it, so that they can report the pattern of bribery across the country or across a city and carry a running total of recorded bribes. This is a powerful tool to pressure the government to act and provide pointers to where the need is most pressing.

In Brazil, where more than half of crimes go unreported because people don’t believe it is worth the effort, WikiCrimes.com asks citizens to record crimes they experiences or witness an a searchable map. “By breaking the authorities” monopoly on crime information and making relevant data more transparent WikiCrimes hopes to force real reforms in Brazil’s criminal justice system,” writes author and transparency activist Micah Sifry.M

In Croatia, blogger Marko Rakar posted a seachable database of all voters on the internet, Widespread fraud became obvious as people looked at the database, seeing nonexistent addresses or small buildings which purportedly housed hundreds of voters. In Russia, citizens who were angry with authorities abusing the “blue lights” that allowed some to race through traffic, asked commuters to record the number plates of cars using the lights – and showed how the law was being flouted.

Kenya lawyer Ory Okolloh believed the authorities were underplaying the post-election violence of 2008, so she created a website where incidents come be reported and mapped - and it became an indispensable guide to what was actually going on.
There are many other examples from around the world of people using the technology and the power of citizens working together to gather and make available information which challenges the authorities and empowers ordinary people. They range from a Chicago site, which allows people to map graffiti to others that track MP’s records of attendance, participation and voting.

All of these are making use of new technology to make the information accessible and unable. And many are harnessing crowd power – the fact that if thousands of citizens are providing and viewing the information, they can often be more effective than few journalists or experts at spotting the patterns trends and meaning in the data. Sometimes these sites ask ordinary people to volunteer to help them analyse masses of data. So when the Guardian of London had masses of obscure information on MP’s expenses, they put it all up and asked people to help them find the stories within it. Or when the Sunlight Reporting Group in the US wanted to find out how often congressmen paid their families with campaign funds, they posted all of their expense records and their family members’ details on a site, and asked people to help them find matches.

This is, Sifry argues, a transparency movement in which computer geeks and activists around the world are harnessing citizens and data in a way that calls authorities to account. While much attention has been focused on WikiLeaks and the behaviour of its founder, Julian Assange, there are enough examples to show the emergence of a global movement to empower citizens with information and force much greater transparency than ever before.

I raise this to contrast it with the way our government’s intelligence and security people are trying to turn back this tide with the Protection of Information Bill, which is up for discussion again in Parliament. On the one side are those using new tools to increase transparency and accountability and fight corruption and the abuse of power, on the other are those who want to buck the global trend and maintain control of the information and the political power that comes with it. Which side do you choose?