Influence Atlas

Inspiration

The inspiration came from hearing about what Palantir is doing along with the US government to perform surveillance around the world in places such as the Middle East. I wanted to be able to gather public data from the internet and do some sort of reverse- surveillance where you can hold politicians accountable for their policies by seeing who is influencing them from other countries.

What it does

The project is meant to aggregate a bunch of public APIs to make conclusions about politicians and how much money they are taking from other countries to pass policies that are of mutual benefit. Since the governments spy on us, I wanted to build a tool to keep them accountable to the people as well.

How we built it

I built it using MeDo AI web app building tool which was super cool to use and the iterative nature made it easier to correct mistakes on the project.

Challenges I ran into

The challenge I ran into with this project is the lack of support for various APIs on the MeDo program, that system for entering API keys could be improved as the AI doesn't digest the keys well enough.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am most proud of how many versions I had of this project before it was finally working. I wanted something viable, usable, and real, not just fake data. So the fact that I pulled data from many APIs and actually got it working is awesome.

What we learned

I have aggregated a lot of data and found out that the US has been influenced by dozens of countries, and the fact that US politics may be compromised by foreign nations is starting to look a lot more likely.

Built With

• fara
• gdelt
• govtrack
• icij
• littlesis
• medo
• opencorporates
• openfec
• opensanctions
• sec-edgar
• usaspending
• wikidata