By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff, 7/4/2003

nnoyed by the prospect of a massive new federal surveillance system, two researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are celebrating the Fourth of July with a new Internet service that will let citizens create dossiers on government officials.

The system will start by offering standard background information on politicians, but then go one bold step further, by asking Internet users to submit their own intelligence reports on government officials -- reports that will be published with no effort to verify their accuracy.

''It's sort of a citizen's intelligence agency,'' said Chris Csikszentmihalyi, assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab. ...