Nixon Tape To Reveal Secrets at Last?

jonerik writes: "As part of its inevitable 30th-anniversary-of-Watergate coverage, ABC News has this article on the National Archives' search for someone who can recover part or all of the missing 18 ½ minutes of President Nixon's Oval Office tapes, whose existence had been unknown until the Watergate hearings. The famous tape - recorded on June 20th, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in - was last examined in 1974, but Nixon tape archivist Karl Weissenbach is hoping that nearly thirty years of technological progress can make the difference this time, saying 'We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered.' Stephen St. Croix, one of several forensic audio experts who is interested in taking on the job, says 'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'" There's another article in Wired on this quest as well.

Comments

well we go to extreme

[Archfeld]

lengths to write over the tapes 20-30 times to try and ensure that data is NOT recoverable. It costs a bundle and is suppose to be totally gone from the 38k c-tape.

Re:well we go to extreme

[captain_craptacular]

A cheaper alternative is a match and some lighter fluid. I challenge anyone to recove a tape "erased" in that manner ;)

Re:well we go to extreme

[DNS-and-BIND]

Any company using that as its documents destruction policy will be sued out of existence faster than you can say, "Jack Flash".

At least in America, where environmental laws apply.

Re:well we go to extreme

[sheepab]

Better to get sued for violating environmental laws than get in trouble for whatever it is they erased.

Re:well we go to extreme

[SeanAhern]

Why don't you degauss them?

Re:well we go to extreme

[hazem]

Why not just break open the tape and feed one end into a cross-cut shredder? The shredder pulls the tape off the spools and it comes out in little bitty bits. If you're really paranoid, you could bulk erase it before hand, and shred more than one tape at a time.

THEN burn it in an incinerator.

Re:well we go to extreme

[4of12]

Any company using that as its documents destruction policy will be sued out of existence faster than you can say, "Jack Flash".

Maybe for environmental reasons, sure.

But, AFAICT, many companies are eager to have a documents policy that specifically spells out how they erase old emails after 2 years, or whatever, etc. Stuff is expected, almost mandated, to be destroyed in an orderly and timely fashion.

It's funny.

I think there's more fear of legal liability after things like Monica Lewinsky's emails and Bill Gates emails to other MS executives, than there is thought to be gained by holding on to past information.

Personally, I've thought the more the better as far as archives are concerned - it's possible to search them for problems that previously came up and got resolved, etc. Probably my job function is so unimportant and requires so little duplicity that I don't appreciate the value of covering my tracks.

Re:well we go to extreme

[SeanAhern]

Yes, I am. That's what government labs do to "scrub" classified media. If it works to safeguard classified information, I figure it'd probably work well to erase an audio tape.

Re:well we go to extreme

[lostchicken]

The cutting doesn't work.

I remember reading something where a military suspect pulled the disc out from the center hole in a floppy, and cut it into some 70 chunks with a pair of pinking shears. They put the thing back together bu spraying aerosolized iron filings onto the pieces, and puting the chunks together with a microscope, where the tracks became visible. They recovered enough data to convict the guy.

This would be really easy if there were no tracks, such as in a reel to reel tape.

Re:well we go to extreme

[kubrick]

A tobacco company (BAT, IIRC) recently lost a lawsuit against a smoker with lung cancer here in Australia because their "Document Retention Policy" involved using many shredders on internal evidence they had been forced to collect for a previous lawsuit by someone else. The case couldn't be decided on the facts, because the facts were currently landfill/compost, so the judge found against the tobacco company.

And then, of course, there's Enron & Arthur Andersen. :)

Re:well we go to extreme

[Gordonjcp]

Hm, 70 roughly equal sized bits of even the disk from a 3.5" floppy are still pretty big. Shredding tape or disks crushes the bits of plastic, chewing up the edges. I suspect even an ordinary document shredder would destroy the disk to the point where it couldn't be recovered in this way. High security shredders reduce the tape to tiny plastic granules about the size of sugar crystals, so you'd have a very hard time sorting them out.

Oh, and reel-to-reel tape does have tracks. It would be hard to put a tape together from fragments though, without knowing what order they come in. As an aside, cutting and sticking together tape is still the most commonly-used method of editing radio programmes and sound effects. If you've ever dropped a couple of lengths while editing, you know how hard it is to get things back in the right order...

Re:well we go to extreme

[bluGill]

True story, back in the '70s my dad worked for Control Data (remember them?). One day the military walked in with a damaged disk, that is the drum (I think it was a drum machine, but I'm not sure) was physically warped. The military used rags to wipe the magnetic coating off the drum, and then burned the rags, and only then did the gaurds leave.

Re:well we go to extreme

[Archfeld]

They apply here, dump illegal chemicals into the environment that would have cost 5 billion to do correctly, get caught and fined 50 million. Our EPA, hell our entire government apparatus is so corporatized it is scary living here. The only saving grace is I can gather anywhere and BIATCH about it to anyone, and I have an arsenal sufficient to supply a combat squad :)

Subject goes here

[sheepab]

I read an article a few days ago about this somewhere, I dont remember where though. Anyway, appearently Nixon was going to erase ALL the tapes, but he realized there were so many of them it would take his lifetime to erase. So he chose to just erase a tiny bit of one tape. The tape was recorded over "between 7 and 11 times". The company that decodes that tape, while getting no compensation from the government, will be rich in publicity alone.

Re:Subject goes here

[doooras]

it would take his whole lifetime to erase? does it take longer to erase than record, or was he not planning on living much longer?

Re:Subject goes here

[zsmooth]

Yes, if you want it erased really well, it does take longer than recording. At least with conventional recording equipment.

Re:Subject goes here

[hyperizer]

If you bothered following the links, you'd see that what you're remembering is from the WIRED article. However, you state this story as fact, wheras the WIRED piece says "More puzzling is why Nixon chose to erase this segment and no other. One theory is that he sat down sometime in 1973 with the intention of erasing all incriminating tapes.... An opposing theory is that the lost conversation is the one Nixon couldn't bear anyone to hear." (Emphasis mine.)

Re:Subject goes here

[adamjaskie]

Uh,really? I would think you could just destroy the tape. Or even just run it through one of those de/re-magnatizer things for screwdrivers, etc. Burn the tape, run it through a shredder of some sort, or even just cut it into really small bits, or just set up something that would run the whole tape across a belt sander or something. I can think of any number of ways to erase a tape, although it would be useless afterwards.

Re:Subject goes here

[EvanED]

Of course, the Nixon tapes were subpoenaed, so destroying them would have brought more (criminal) charges of destroying evidence.

Re:Subject goes here

[adamjaskie]

Uh, isnt erasing them also destroying evidence?

Re:Subject goes here

[EvanED]

Two theories: the erasure occured before the subpoena was issued (though why he'd erase but not destroy is beyond me), or the subpoenas only applied to the physical tapes and not the data on them. To be honest, I'm really not sure. But I find it amusing that one of the biggest court cases in the second part of the century was called The United States vs. Richard Nixon while Nixon was still the president...

Re:Subject goes here

[zsmooth]

Yes, apparently there was some reason not to destroy the tapes. Maybe he wanted to use the tapes to "back up" his record collection... I dunno......

Re:Subject goes here

[LeBain]

A big magnet would erase them all in no time. You don't have to run tapes back through a recorder to erase them.

Re:Subject goes here

[EvanED]

With no microphone plugged into the tape deck, it was accidentally recorded over over five times???

(See the paragraph that reads as follows: "Tape 342, as it's known by archivists, was last tested in 1974 by a panel of audio experts, who concluded that the erasures were done in separate segments. Whoever erased the tape pressed Record, stopped the tape, and hit Record again, between five and nine times")

Slightly o/t

[itwerx]

but wouldn't it be funny if the missing minutes were just Nixon concealing from his wife the fact that he'd been yuk-yukking it up with his beer buddies about his latest sexual conquests...?

Re:Slightly o/t

[tomhudson]

Nah, that's the Kennedy tapes.

Re:Slightly o/t

[grytpype]

Nixon didn't have sexual conquests. Even Pat is questionable.

Re:Slightly o/t

[rjamestaylor]

Nixon didn't have sexual conquests. Even Pat is questionable.

I always question androgenously-named females...

Re:Slightly o/t

[colmore]

I was probably the only person in the world to see the movie Dick (not not *that* movie, the one that came to regular theaters)

It had an interesting take on the 18 1/2 mintues, as well as the identity of Deep Throat.

Re:Slightly o/t

[Cognitive Dissident]

but wouldn't it be funny if the missing minutes were just Nixon concealing from his wife the fact that he'd been yuk-yukking it up with his beer buddies about his latest sexual conquests...?

No, no... you're confusing these with the Clinton tapes, and Hillary isn't as dumb as Dick Nixon -- her tapes were not discovered by the special prosecutors, much to Bill's relief.

High-tech equipment

[JollyTX]

"To decipher that data, forensic experts would use "bandpass filters" and other high-tech devices that look for frequencies that they do not need within a sound."

Wow, "bandpass filters"; that _is_ high-tech! Wonder when they'll be available to consumers.

Re:High-tech equipment

[nomel]

Someone told me that it will be around 5 years before the reach the consumer market. There's rumors that you can make them with voodoo magic...

Never erase

[Indras]

'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'

This is true of pretty much any data-recording device, especially FAT hard drives or floppy disks. To mark a file as deleted, a file's FAT entry simply has the first character of the filename removed. To "undelete" it, it has to still be intact on the hard drive and then have the first character of the filename restored.

I'm interested in seeing how this concept works on video tape, I imagine the process is probably a lot more in-depth than this, so kudos to them if they pull it off.

Re:Never erase

[nurb432]

Not even close to the same thing. Analog tapes, you simply attempt to scatter the magnetics of the tape so you 'cant' bring it back...

All you end up doing is making it quieter.. hoping noone can subtract the sound from the hiss..

Re:Never erase

[sheepab]

This isnt true, you can low level format the drive, and that will get rid of ANY trace of ANY data. It physically goes through every part of the drive and resets it all to 0. Granted it takes like, a day or two to do it. Atleast in my experience.

Re:Never erase

[KingKire64]

Ive tried data recovery several times. Deleteing a file and toasting a FAT table or nuking a partition table are all very different things. I know that you can recover data that has been deleted and not written over. But what about data that has been written over. Would you read quantum resonance or something? Once data has been replaced with other data well... it gone.

Re:Never erase

[nurb432]

Only works if your heads are 100% perfectally on track.. if its the least bit off, there will be residual patterns that can be recovered..

True its an ENORMOUS amount of work. but it can be done.. Just ask any NSA agent.. ( but dont tell them i sent you :) )

Re:Never erase

[JabberWokky]

I'm interested in seeing how this concept works on video tape, I imagine the process is probably a lot more in-depth than this, so kudos to them if they pull it off.

Little too early - these were reel to reel audio tapes, iirc.

That said, digital data can be recovered even when written over a few times. Analog data is probably significantly more difficult, as you can't look for up or down "ghost echos"... you kinda have to try and clean up a faint signal scattered in a noisy medium. Some impressive algorithims cleaning up "random noise" have been popping up lately - don't ask me how they work, though. Some Deep Magic lies in that field.

And yes, getting overwritten data is tremendously expensive, requiring that you peel apart the media and run it through a physical magnetic scanning device. There are several private companies you can approach, with basic consultation (no recovery) starting at ten or twenty thousand dollars. They have pretty good track records, and I know a couple financial institutions that used their services. I'm sure there are some people in the NSA who are just as good (I'd imagine that the private companies and spooks are pretty much the same pool of people and experts).

--
Evan

Re:Never erase

[hokanomono]

I think the analogy to FAT does not go very far. At least for the usual use of harddisks it's this way: if you overwirte it (with /dev/random, f.i.), it's gone. I remember when a friend found out about undelete and wanted to show me how great it works and that he can save more data on his hardisk that way.. luckily he just chose autoxec.bat for his demonstration (we were about 13 then).

I think marking a file as deleted is just like removing the label from a tape. The interesting part is, to recover the data, after it has been overwritten.

Re:Never erase

[mosch]

your experience is incorrect.

a low-level format will prevent data recovery using the heads that are attached to the platters by default, but one can put much more sensitive (and expensive) heads over the platters and read erased data with ease. Hell, with even more expensive equipment you can not only recover the data that was erased, but the last few pieces of data that were stored there.

Re:Never erase

[joshki]

Think again... Even if you overwrite it, someone with the right equipment (electron scanning microscope, etc) can still get it back. DOD standards require overwriting once with a fixed character, then that character's complement, then with another random character. There's a very good reason for that.

Re:Never erase

[Porag_Spliffing]

I think you'll find on [video]tape it is done by feeding the tape past an erase head that has a fairly high frequency alternating field. This is also done for recording to remove ghosts of the previous image before writing the new.

Re:Never erase

[EvanED]

There's also a very good reason PGP's wipe feature can record over the same area a few dozen times. They say 12 times is good enough for most things though. But military people may want to do it 20.

Re:Never erase

[RegularFry]

You should be able to do it with the original heads and more than one pass, if you can get at the signal processing algorithms. A "1" overwritten by a "1" will be more "1" than a "0" overwritten by a "1", but it's rather nonlinear. Doesn't need access to the head shifts, either, but it's only good for (maybe) a couple of layers of data.

Dibs!

[GeekLife.com]

Ooh, I want to be the first to release the deleted parts as lowercase? Do I have to pay royalties to the Nixon estate?

Would they have to make clear what the sounds constituted, then, to prove they deserved royalties?

18.5 minutes....

[carlos_benj]

...isn't that the long version of Inna Gadda Davida?

Re:18.5 minutes....

[thaigan]

It's also the length of Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie...

Re:18.5 minutes....

[carlos_benj]

It's also the length of Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie...

Yeah, but that's the old theory...

Re:18.5 minutes....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, the live In-a-gadda-da-vida recording is
19:00 minutes long.

Toon "Da Fortran Devil" Moene.

Re:18.5 minutes....

[carlos_benj]

Actually, you're thinking of the short version :)

I was really just thinking about the drum solo....

Re:18.5 minutes....

[carlos_benj]

Dang! I've had more AC replies to this than anything I've ever posted.

Conclusion: Most AC's are over 40.

Re:18.5 minutes....

[sean23007]

... no, the short version. ;)

Re:18.5 minutes....

[Creepy]

Inna Gadda Davida was originally "In the Garden of Eden" but the lyrics were so garbled that even other people in the band didn't know what was being sung (trivial knowledge credited to Behind the Music -- or some show like Behind the Music).

If the Nixon tapes are enunciated as bad as this song, we may never know what the real tape said. Hopefully tricky Dick didn't just finish a 3 martini lunch when this was recorded... :P

30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[Bonker]

"Fr15+ P05+!!!1!"

Personally, I'm fairly interested in all this, especially seeing who it's going to hurt today. Remember that 30 years ago is not ancient history. Many people who are still high-ranking members of government now were members of government then.

In the recent hooplah surrounding the new book, Pat Buchannan was named as a possible 'Deep Throat', something I seriously doubt. Still, it raises questions. Suppose that someone we respect *cough* *cough* is in actuality a criminal?

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[Dolly_Llama]

Pat Buchannan was named as a possible 'Deep Throat', something I seriously doubt. Still, it raises questions. Suppose that someone we respect *cough* *cough* is in actuality a criminal?

I guess that takes Pat Buchanan out of consideration...

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[leighklotz]

Anybody remember who finally fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who was investigating Nixon?

Turns out, it was a 25-year-old named...Robert Bork, who was famously rejected for supreme court in 1987 and hired by Netscape in 1998 to lobby their case!

See a Dr. Dobbs Journal reprint from 1998 for geek-friendly history.

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[DNS-and-BIND]

The famous "Borking" of Bork's Supreme Court nomination was payback from the Left for his volunteering to be Nixon's hatchet man.

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[guanxi]

Suppose that someone we respect *cough* *cough* is in actuality a criminal?

I know you're being sarcastic (or smoking something) but it's a critical point:

Someone you do, is. In fact, many are. And many you think are criminals, aren't. The problems is, we'll never find them all out. So every time you're sure, you're wrong about one thing at least.

I'll end my off-topic rant with others' rants:

We know for certain only when we know little. With knowledge, doubt increases. - Goethe

Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one. - Voltaire

Dogs bark at those whom they do not know. - Heraclitus

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[jafac]

Just because Clinton got a blow job, does not mean that there isn't really a vast right-wing conspiracy. . .

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[Brendor]

In the June 24th issue of TIME, they do a summary of this story in the Notebook. What's curious is that amongst the four listed by Dean as possibilities, Buchanan is listed as not having explicitly denied being Deep Throat in the past. The other 2 non-explicit replies, from Press Secretary Zeigler and speech-writer Ray Price, imply that Deep throat is/was not just one person.

Of the four, my admittedly biased knowledge of the facts leads me to seriously consider Buchanan as the source known as Deep Throat. He's always been a bit of a maverick, hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson while Buchanan was the top Nixon speech-writer and HST was writing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and his topsy-turvy relationship to his political parties come to mind as immediate examples.

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[Cognitive Dissident]

Of the four, my admittedly biased knowledge of the facts leads me to seriously consider Buchanan as the source known as Deep Throat. He's always been a bit of a maverick, hanging out with Hunter S. Thompson while Buchanan was the top Nixon speech-writer and HST was writing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 and his topsy-turvy relationship to his political parties come to mind as immediate examples.

And wasn't Buchanan also Nixon's Press Secretary for at least as while as well as a speech writer? Being in direct contact with journalists like that implies that he must have had at least some flair for getting along with them i.e. had some sympathies. He was later a commentator on CNN's 'Crossfire' for that matter. This is practically forgotten today. This would seem to be the sort of person who would feel 'the people's right to know' was important and might go to extra-ordinary lengths to insure that cover-ups were not allowed to succeed.

Re:30 years ago, Richard Nixon said...

[Art Tatum]

Yes. And who is part of that conspiracy? Someone you know, perhaps. Someone you know very well. Yesssssss. Someone close to you...

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[Fantanicity]

Nixon wasn't impeached.

Technical Literacy

[capt.Hij]

From the wired article:
Haldeman recounts in his now out-of-print book, The Ends of Power, that Nixon struggled with the most basic functions of cassette recorders.

They go on to detail how they had to mark the buttons so that Nixon could use a tape recorder. Wow.

There has been a lot of talk about people complaining that in the digital age most information will get lost. As long as techno-idiots like this are drawn to public service I doubt that there will be any problem in keeping track of what they say and write. I seriously doubt these folks are going to be able to get rid of information.

Even if they have high priced people to handle things for them, I can't help but think that they are going to leave behind really stupid stuff.

Re:Technical Literacy

[bellings]

They go on to detail how they had to mark the buttons so that Nixon could use a tape recorder. Wow.

Imagine -- the guy needed instructions to use his custom built, custom installed voice-activated tape recorder. And, since he the times that he had to make damn sure he was using it right were probably times he didn't want some 23 year old geek getting in his way, he made damn sure the geeks marked the custom-installed buttons for the thing at the same time they gave him verbel instructions.

Yeah, Nixon was a moron. You're clearly so much smarter, because you can use linux.

Re:Technical Literacy

[geekoid]

I have to fix GUI that are written by peple with that mentality all the time.
I know what it is, therefor it's intuitive.
sheesh.

Just in case you missed it...

[ALoverOfPeace]

There were some other juicy parts released not too long ago.

Re:Just in case you missed it...

[ChipDude]

That's a way-out web site you've got there. "Read and sign a petition that will bring attention to the subversion of the FBI by the Anti-Defamation League"?? Riiiiiight....

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Yea, and Clinton "was" imepached. Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

Hey, maybe if more "terrible secrets" get revealed, they can impeach him today. Weren't they going to try that with Clinton? heh.

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[carlos_benj]

Blah... I don't like Nixon

I liked him. Graduated in '74 - right after he stopped the draft!

Also, he wasn't impeached. He resigned. Clinton was impeached but stayed in office.

Audio Archaeology

[Hatter]

Here is a previous story on this topic. St. Croix sounds like a pretty paranoid guy, tinfoil hat. A quote from the article I linked above:

St.Croix agreed to let me visit him, but because of security concerns, I was told to come to his house, not the office.... He gave me precise instructions for the cabby. I was told to get out at the end of a certain cul-de-sac. "Then wait for the cab to leave," he said. "I'm serious. And after you're sure the cab's gone, walk down the driveway to the left. Don't come to the front door. Just keep walking. You'll set off the lasers in my woods. I'll know you're coming and come out to meet you."

Interesting guy. Here's a link to his company's webpage.

Re:Audio Archaeology

[DNS-and-BIND]

"Even paranoids have real enemies." --Delmore Schwartz, quote often misattributed to Richard Nixon.

Re:Audio Archaeology

[cheezit]

I know (knew, actually, we're out of touch now) St. Croix's brother quite well (St. Croix is not his birth name). Very interesting family full of inventor-type talent and drive---and ego---but a certain quirkiness and flamboyance too. I believe the laser story based on what I have heard.

If anyone can do this, St. Croix probably can.

Re:Audio Archaeology

[Lurkingrue]

Sounds like this guy's seen "Enemy of the State" one too many times...

Anyone seen the film "Dick"?

[Thornae]

Okay, so it wasn't the greatest film. But I thought their explanation for the missing eighteen minutes and the whole Deep Throat thing was pretty damned amusing. The dream sequence between Michelle Williams and Dan Hedaya was hilarilous. Incidentally, Hedaya is one of the better Nixons I've seen.

And wouldn't it be a crack up if the missing minutes really were the confessions of a lovesick teenager?

Re:Anyone seen the film "Dick"?

[pmancini]

Dick was an awesome movie. One of the best takes on historical fiction I've ever seen. It's comedy was great, the use of actual history was great and the comedic acting was great. I thought the movie was a slam dunk. Highly recommended. It also explains why Woodward and Bernstein will never reveal their source!!!

Watergate still??

[EastCoastSurfer]

I realize the technical merits of the article, but why is the general media still harping on something that happened 30 years ago? Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...? These things are much more current and still have real implications to people in power (not to mention someone is dead).

Re:Watergate still??

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you being serious?

The identity of Deep Throat is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the last quarter century.

It has historical value, and always seems to come up.

I mean, look at your examples. Two of them were named after Watergate!

Re:Watergate still??

[Edmund Blackadder]

because most of these turned out to be duds. Because if the media covers the fact that all the investigations returned nothing, they will look really damn stupid, for covering fake scandals for 8 years.

Re:Watergate still??

[Lysander Luddite]

Maybe because it is attributed to a President resigning his office?

Re:Watergate still??

[Pauly]

Yeah, the media sure did steer clear of scandals during the Clinton years. Yup, not once did I hear mention of scandal on the radio or TV with a Dem in the whitehouse.

Get your head outta Rush Limbaugh's ass and realize how stupid comments like these are.

Re:Watergate still??

[Waffle Iron]

The media is composed of Democrats raised on Watergate. That's why they only care about scandals in Republican administrations.

Oh, that explains why I've never been able find any mention about Monica Lewinsky in the news...

Re:Watergate still??

[grytpype]

What kind of braindead hick are you?

Re:Watergate still??

[arfy]

>>Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...?

Probably because those things got investigated up and down seven ways from Sunday by a bunch of guys who really wanted to nail Clinton and they couldn't find enough to convince the country to toss him out, while Nixon had to run out of office fast enough to keep his pension?

And if the media thought they could rally enough support for anniversary specials on those things, trust me, we'd have 'em out the wazoo. Even Robert Ray doesn't care about those things anymore...

Re:Watergate still??

[Chasuk]

Watergate overshadows all of the other manufactured "scandals" that you mention above. It was easily the biggest scandal of the last 50 years, and will be discussed by historians centuries hence, long after the name "Vince Foster" had faded from memory.

Re:Watergate still??

[Anonymous Coward]

The media is composed of Democrats raised on Watergate. That's why they only care about scandals in Republican administrations.

Uhh.. if that's the case, then why don't i ever hear anyone in the media talking about the scandals of the Reagan years? Ever? Even though it's topical, and it would probably be fascinating to see a media review of "here is what the Eisenhower through Reagan administrations did covertly as foreign policy in the name of fighting Communism, and this is how it affects the current geopolitical climate, which is important becuase the U.S. is currently fighting an open-ended war against a number of nations whose current political situation is a direct result of U.S. actions"?

People keep going back to watergate because it's clear, it's dramatic and theatrical, and it's morally unambiguous. The whole thing is almost a greek epic on the Great Man Corrupted by Power. That's about it. It appeals to people's love of drama without challenging any of their held beliefs or making them understand complicated geopolitical context.

Re:Watergate still??

[Pauly]

Well put. You're some anonymous coward!

Re:Watergate still??

[startled]

Why doesn't the media cover anything of consequence any more? At least in the American media, it appears the assumption is that we don't care about international events, and we're too stupid to understand anything of consequence domestically.

Travelgate? Filegate? Vince Foster? WTF? Those are barrel-scraping attempts to dumb something down for general consumption. How about no TV coverage of genocide in Yugoslavia for almost two years after they knew it was going on? Hell, domestic current events haven't been covered substantively on TV for a good decade or so, and not in newspapers aside from the NYTimes and Washington Post.

No, the general media nowadays has no respectability. They cover nothing of substance. When's the last time I saw a mention in the paper about a bill going through my state's legislature? I'm lucky to see a mention of a federal bill outside of the budget, Medicare, or "terrorism". Meanwhile, there are giant cover stories on last year's dog mauling.

The media is covering Watergate for two reasons. One, of course, is they think it'll sell. This is a big thing that a lot of their audience lived through.

The other, more interesting, reason is that they're covering a time when they had respectability and impact. When investigative journalist meant something other than Geraldo Rivera. When journalistic careers were made by covering big events in a dangerous foreign country, or uncovering something big in political dealings at home. Now, foreign reporters get 5 minutes a day on CNN. Domestic reporters follow the police scanner to the site of the latest rich white babynapping or Chandra Levy's remains.

Nostalgia, then. Followups on a time when they had a function other than exposing sex scandals. Why would they follow up on something current, if no one cared about it in the first place? Yes, there are still respectable reporters doing significant work. But they're quite fringe, and mostly read by academics, politicians, "experts", and the tiny portion of the population that actually cares enough to read intelligent coverage on what's going on in the world. It's enough to support two newspapers and a handful of magazines.

Re:Watergate still??

[GooseKirk]

Because travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc. are all stupid, and no one this side of Rush Limbaugh cares. At least the Republicans have the common courtesy to have decent scandals... Watergate, Iran-Contra and Inslaw are all monuments of scandal, and deserving of ongoing recognition.

Also, you may want to brush up on your politics, because some people from Watergate are still in positions of power. Even more Iran-Contra veterans are in the Bush administration.

Re:Watergate still??

[jcast]

I never said the media ignored Democrat scandals. I said they give far more attention to Republican scandals.

Re:Watergate still??

[nobody69]

Hey, the networks wanted to do a dramatic reading of the Starr Report, but the FCC wouldn't let them.

Actually, the media was raised on Watergate and they are a bit left-leaning on average. However, the lesson that every reporter learned from Watergate was "If I help bring down a President, I'll be rich and famous." Which party the President belongs to is a minor consideration next to that. Scandals are news that leads to books and speaking tours. Reporters will bite on them, even if the righty reporters bite first on the Dems and vice-versa.

The reason Watergate is a bigger deal than Clinton's idiocy was that most people can see that lying about cheating on your wife is less of a threat to democracy than breaking into the headquarters of the opposing political party and lying about it.

If you think that Clinton is worse, could you please explain why?

Re:Watergate still??

[jcast]

If you think that Clinton is worse, could you please explain why?

Vince. Foster. Is. Dead.

Re:Watergate still??

[jcast]

A C.S. Research Assistant braindead hick.

Re:Watergate still??

[jcast]

Got a bit of evidence the media is not liberal (as in left of the average American, not left of the average /.er) or not raised on Watergate?

Re:Watergate still??

[jcast]

By the way, I'd like to congratulate all y'all leftists---six replies and two form a valid argument!

Re:Watergate still??

[commodoresloat]

Uhh.. if that's the case, then why don't i ever hear anyone in the media talking about the scandals of the Reagan years? Ever? Even though it's topical, and it would probably be fascinating to see a media review of "here is what the Eisenhower through Reagan administrations did covertly as foreign policy in the name of fighting Communism, and this is how it affects the current geopolitical climate, which is important becuase the U.S. is currently fighting an open-ended war against a number of nations whose current political situation is a direct result of U.S. actions"?

Not to mention it is topical because a lot of the same creeps who committed what amounts to high treason during the Reagan Administration are back in office again (e.g. Poindexter, Reich, Negroponte, Abrams) except now they have an even better excuse than the "war on communism" to trash the Constitution and send the U.S. military all around the world. We've heard more about Monica Lewinsky than anyone could ever want and yet we've never had a real accounting of the crimes of the Reagan Administration. This video is enlightening for folks who want to be more educated on the topic....

Re:Watergate still??

[GooseKirk]

Even if your hypothesis is true - and "more attention" is very debatable, especially when you consider the scandal-packed years of the Reagan administration that are all but forgotten, while the various lame-ass -gates of the Clinton years just keep circling around the drain of the right-wing press - the fact is, Democrats can't even do scandals very well. The Republicans have them beat hands-down in that department, so if it seems like there's more attention paid to them, that's probably why.

Of course, the media is also unfair to your shallow personal pet belief system because of a sinister conspiracy. There's always that.

Re:Watergate still??

[jcast]

I was talking about the mainstream press. And as for ``doing scandals well''---Waco, Vince Foster, Robert Brown, etc. You don't know about those because the media refuses to report on them.

Oh, btw., how did you know I was a conservative and not an honest liberal? Oh that's right, liberals have exactly the same beliefs as you. Conservatives are everyone else.

Re:Watergate still??

[startled]

Actually, it's generally the opposite. You're not likely to want to read or trust any Phil Krugman if your a Limbaugh-ite, but he wrote a rather interesting editorial contrasting Republican and Democrat billionaires.*

The upshot was that Democrat billionaires, like Ted Turner, throw a lot of cash at things like the United Nations, world hunger, etc.. Whereas Republican billionaires, such as Rev Sun Myung Moon and Richard Mellon Scaife, use their power and money to run big-time smear campaigns.

While it sounds like a slanted view, there does seem to be a lot of evidence to back it up. There's actually a lot more evidence of Republican-run smear campaigns than anything about a "liberal media". Can you imagine what kind of right-wing furor and media buzz you'd be getting if it was Gore instead of Cheney who refused to give up records he'd been ordered to turn over? If it was Clinton's dad getting the fat defense contracts, and his buddies dictating policy that led to their enrichment and Enron's collapse?

Maybe most journalists have liberal leanings, but it doesn't have nearly the impact of a well-run smear organization. The liberals are horrible at media control, and have been for some time. They need to learn to play hardball, or they'll keep getting smacked around in the papers like they have been for decades. Clinton survived on his skill and charisma, but the rest of the liberal media-feeding organization doesn't have his talent.

* I don't have the article, and it costs money. But here's a link to the summary, I hope it works; it's a funky link.

Re:Watergate still??

[benzapp]

We don't hear about the scandals because there weren't any.

Iran-contra? anyone remember how that got started? The New York Times printing an article on the FRONT PAGE suggesting that George Bush, the VP candidate for president flew to Iran to convince the iranians to NOT release the hostages so that Carter would lose the election? After criticisms that Bush didn't have the time to do any of that, they then suggested he flew in an SR-71?

The list goes on. What Reagan ALLEGEDLY did was very questionably illegal, and no evidence ever came of it. However, Clinton in fact committed crimes, recognized throughout history as being crimes.

Re:Watergate still??

[e40]

Got any evidence the media is liberal?

Re:Watergate still??

[e40]

Here's my "evidence". Remember the Clinton years? The media and the republicans would not leave him alone. I'm assuming you were not in a coma during those years and I don't have to give references.

Furthermore, witness the kissing of George W. Bush's ass since he was elected. That, if anything, should tell you the media is right wing. Speaking of which, there's the entire FoxNews staff, oh, and Rush. Yep, pretty damn right wing.

Don't forget to name call me a lefty, even though you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Re:Watergate still??

[benzapp]

Murder, lying to prevent a sexual harassment lawsuit, sexual harassment itself, rape, tax fraud, insider trading.

CATTLE FUTURES. VINCE FOSTER.

Reagan's alleged crimes were done for the expressed purpose of helping those fighting for their freedom against communism. He had nothing to gain. Nothing to hide from his wife. He didn't make any money. Congress had no authority to prevent the commander in chief from giving military arms to whomever he wishes. That power is vested in the President in the constitution.

The suggestan that Reagan had any contact with the Iranians was pure insanity, an outright lie that even the NY Times retracted due to its insanity. So much so, that Iran-Contra is the wrong name. It just the Nicaragua Contras story now. And of course, no one even knows who the contras are.

Nixon. Some two bit espionage done by an underling, that very likely occured without his knowledge. What was he guilty of? covering up a stupid move by someone acting without his authority. If anything, it is the same thing as Clinton covering up his sexual misconduct. They were both petty crimes. At least Nixon got us out of the Vietnam war, and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. Clinton just pissed off our enemies, and now the World Trade Center is gone.

Clinton's crimes were crimes for his personal gain, crimes against private citizens to deprive them of their property, sexual propriety, or very life, so he could enrich his power and personal gain.

Reagan did none of this. Hell, even Nixon got us out of Vietnam, something Democrats always forget.

What did Clinton do? Nothing, but rape the american people for whatever he wanted. Money. Sex. Power. He was a tyrannical criminal in the truest sense of the word.

Re:Watergate still??

[benzapp]

This is exactly the problem with communists, they have this unfortunate disposition to honestly believe that anyone who disagrees with them is being stupid.

They also tend to believe in the paranormal and ESP.

See, this commie thinks that a) if we thought about this we would agree with him and b) he can read your mind and thus knows that this phenomenon is true.

Re:Watergate still??

[jjohnson]

Clinton's crimes were crimes for his personal gain, crimes against private citizens to deprive them of their property, sexual propriety, or very life, so he could enrich his power and personal gain.

And after seven years and $70,000,000, the only "crime" proven was that he got blowjobs from an intern.

Clinton's two terms yielded 1 felony conviction. Reagan's two terms yielded 29.

Re:Watergate still??

[jjohnson]

Clinton's time in office yielded exactly one felony conviction.

Reagan's time in office yielded 29.

Fascinating contrast, no?

Re:Watergate still??

[jjohnson]

Just what do you think happened to Vince Foster?

I can tell you're a conservative because liberals aren't interested in "The Clinton Hit List".

Re:Watergate still??

[nomadic]

Ohhhh, you're crazy. Ok, that explains some things...

Re:Watergate still??

[squiggleslash]

Well, there's the in depth, well researched, answer and then there's the racey, slap one's head and say "Of course!" answer to your question, take your pick.

Re:Watergate still??

[thales]

"the fact is, Democrats can't even do scandals very well. The Republicans have them beat hands-down in that department"

Oh I think conspircing with organized crime Bosses to overthrow a government (Cuba) and Wiretapping and Spying on Dr. King tops anything the GOP has done in the last Century. Of course it's easy to get away with things like that when your name is Kennedy.

Re:Watergate still??

[hondo77]

Is that counting people like Ollie North, who would have been convicted ("I lied to Congress") had Republican senators not been so quick to give them immunity, ostensibly to get to the facts but really to make them almost impossible to prosecute?

Re:Watergate still??

[hondo77]

Blaming Clinton for 9/11--you Clinton-haters are just so pathetic.

Re:Watergate still??

[GooseKirk]

The funny part is, alternative news outlets on all sides of the political spectrum have widely disseminated (relatively, anyway) news about Waco and the coverup. If the mainstream media doesn't report on it because they're "liberal", why would an alternative news outlet that really is specifically liberal (such as Democracy Now) report on it? Your simplistic hypothesis doesn't hold up.

Reputable news organizations of all stripes don't seem to be interested in touching the Vince and RON Brown stories anymore because, outside of the rabid Clinton-hating crowd, they're almost universally accepted to be crackpot.

How these compare in your mind to relatively well-documented and understood cases like Watergate, Iran-Contra and Inslaw is beyond me, but I'm sure you've got a rationalization for it. Whatever.

Re:Watergate still??

[GooseKirk]

Oh, sure, a Kennedy always his hands in a good scandal somewhere, but you don't really see them in power very much these days. As much as the opposing team tries, the sad truth is that the Democrats haven't fielded a contender worthy of scandal since LBJ.

Although, even those examples aren't really all that impressive. Trying to overthrow Castro by any means was a long-standing hobby for the US government regardless of political affiliation, and wiretapping MLK was Hoover's bag. And almost everything from that era is so fraught with shadowy conspiracy and players from all sorts of angles, it's hard to pin anything on any one affiliation.

Not like Dick Nixon, a classic and tragic villain for the ages. Now that's a beautiful scandal. Iran-contra and Inslaw are almost as impressive, but so far in my lifetime, the Democrats have been totally slacking. It's really a shame.

Re:Watergate still??

[Jonny 290]

No, you didn't say that.

And I quote:

That's why they only care about scandals in Republican administrations

There is no "almost" in there, no "far more" in there, no "barely" in there. You spoke in absolutes. Sucks that you can't edit posts, huh?

Re:Watergate still??

[jjohnson]

Does the tinfoil hat still slip over your eyes, or did you cut eyeholes?

Re:Watergate still??

[operagost]

Yeah he lied to Congress... just like Clinton. But it was okay for Clinton. Everyone said such an important should be entitled to keep his extramarital affairs private, even if questioned under oath.

Re:Watergate still??

[operagost]

NO! He LIED UNDER OATH! How many times must we tell you leftists that that was the issue? It wouldn't have mattered if he lied about whether he masturbated to a picture of Janet Reno in the Oval Office, he LIED. Plus, he was wasting 'company time', getting off while he was supposed to be helping run the nation.

Re:Watergate still??

[DarkProphet]

Perhaps you should start reading a different newspaper. Both of the major newspapers around here are very good about reporting what is going on in state legislature. Though I do have to empathize with your sentiment. Before 9/11, the biggest news was the whole Condit/Levy thing, which in the big scheme of things is not really that big of a deal. Sorry. But at least someone pointed about potential corruption on government (like we don't already know its an ongoing thing). You allude to it yourself: The problem here is not with the media itself. Like any other industry, it tries to cater to the lowest-common-denominator, thus your unintelligent fluff stories instead of stuff that (supposedly) matters. The real problem, at least in the U.S, is that the populous as a whole is incredibly apathetic to things that don't directly affect it. I know I sure don't really give a rat's ass whats happening in the middle east. So far as I can tell its really just business as usual. Now if nukes start going of there, THAT will be news. I'd be surprised if anyone is really that nuts. But anyway, thats kind of what I'm trying to get at. Really, a lot of stuff is same shit, different day(TM) if you will. The rest is just details.

Re:Watergate still??

[jjohnson]

My apologies: he lied under oath.

The score is still 29 to 1.

Re:Watergate still??

[Happy go Lucky]

No, the general media nowadays has no respectability. They cover nothing of substance. When's the last time I saw a mention in the paper about a bill going through my state's legislature? I'm lucky to see a mention of a federal bill outside of the budget, Medicare, or "terrorism". Meanwhile, there are giant cover stories on last year's dog mauling.

Suggestion: Either get a new paper or a new state. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain Spews are actually pretty good at tracking what our fine useless drones in the dome are doing. (Nothing particularly useful, as in Colorado they're almost as worthless as Congress.)

As for Federal bills, try either the Wall Street Jwournal (for general stuff) or special-interest publications (for special-interest stuff). The Sierra Club will probably have more-detailed coverage of HR 12345, the "Stop Sodomizing Squirrels Act of 2002" than a general paper.

The WSJ is worth noting as being Stuff that Matters, as economics and trade have a much greater effect on people's lives than "ATI Releases Yet Another Graphics Card Which Will Do Nothing More Than Last Year's Model for 99% of Users" or "The Mainland Chinese Government are still a bunch of fascist bastards" or "Jack Straw and John Ashcroft Caught Surveilling Public Washrooms at the YMCA."

Besides, you need to cut the reporters some slack. They tend to be a bit better-educated than their readers, but that doesn't stop them from being ignorant, uninformed dolts. Have you EVER seen a reporter get something right, which concerns your profession? (I don't even know what you do. I wear a blue uniform on behalf of a city government, so I have massive examples of them getting it all wrong with respect to what I do. Examples of them knowing anything are distressingly rare.)

Besides, I grew up with the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Capitol-Journal before I moved to Colorado. And either one of them is a far better paper than the two examples you name. The NYT has some of the most ignorant writers on the planet. That these people are allowed to tie their own shoes in the morning is impressive enough.

Re:Watergate still??

[startled]

If you want to engage in rational debate, get a nick and cut the personal attacks. If you just want to hear yourself talk, by all means, flame on.

Re:Watergate still??

[GSloop]

Part of what makes Watergate different than any political scandal involving the executive branch since, is that it was a direct threat to the electoral process.

The executive branch was using broad government powers (FBI, IRS, Office of the President etc, FCC) to try to taint the electoral system. Blackmail of candidates, intimidation, IRS audits of your enemies, loss of FCC licenses etc to stifle press reporting, kill oposition, etc. (Go read "Personal History" by Katherine Meyer Graham

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0 37 5701044-0

It gives a real view of the power that the Nixon administration had over many others, and the political life and course.

Reagan may have been a felon, he ignored Congress, and violated the law, but it wasn't really a serious risk to the politial system we have. Same with Clinton - although I don't think his actions were a felony class offense...

Nixon on the other hand used the power of the presidency to attempt to dramatically skew the political system.

These actions are the very actions that our founding fathers were most anxious about, and a significant reason that Watergate was and is coverd with such vigor. It was a serious threat, and had to receive serious through attention. Without the dogged determination and serious risk of the Wash Post, we probably wouldn't have ever known about Watergate like we do today. They were nearly alone in pursuing the story.

Cheers!

Re:Watergate still??

[Paul Komarek]

Heh, I suppose Clinton could have said "I don't recall" every time he was asked about something. That would have been *so* much better! =-)

More seriously, there's a big *practical* difference in allowing someone to withhold info about extramarital affairs, versus allowing someone to stonewall on arms deals with rebels in Iran. I contend that, practically speaking, a lie is not a lie is not a lie.

And heck, Congress lies to us (and stonewalls, as far as that goes) all the time. We should feel vindicated when someone lies to them! ;-)

-Paul Komarek

Re:Watergate still??

[Paul Komarek]

"Reagan's alleged crimes were done for the expressed purpose of helping those fighting for their freedom against communism."

When was the last time you saw America do something for the pure, unadultered sake of helping someone fight for "freedom", "against communism"? Our government doesn't give a damn about communism -- we attack *ANY AND ALL* governments that don't bow down to our whims. It's as if our government is the Microsoft of governments.

"Congress had no authority to prevent the commander in chief from giving military arms to whomever he wishes."

Bullshit. We have laws, as well as policies, governing how we distribute and sell arms. The commander-in-chief is not God.

"That power is vested in the President in the constitution."

You'll have to quote a section and paragraph number for me. I don't recall reading this in our Constitution. If you can show it to me, I'll back down immediately. And then I'll work on an amendment.

"Nixon. Some two bit espionage done by an underling, that very likely occured without his knowledge. What was he guilty of? covering up a stupid move by someone acting without his authority."

Oh, really? Maybe this is exactly what we'd like to know. Maybe this is why we're still interested in Watergate.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Watergate still??

[Paul Komarek]

I think his point was that Democrats fail to take full advantage of Republican scandals, while Republicans have shown prowess at turning even little Democrat scandals into intolerable, torturous, nation-destroying scandals.

At least Watergate was interesting (as are the things you mention). The Lewinsky and Whitewater stuff went on for ages, and was dull. The Republicans got bored of their own scandal, and some eventually asked Newt to go away.

-Paul Komarek

Re:Watergate still??

[Vermithrax]

Future historians are more likely to look back on it as only the first and most significant of a trail of republican electoral frauds.
1. Nixon (this is the only one to be admitted)
2. Regan/Bush meetings with Kidnappers representatives to ensure that hostages were not released until after election and so ensure their election over Carter
3. The last election taking electoral corruption to new extremes.

that's not countingthe political corruption, drug running,and other assorted crimes committed by these administrations.

compared to this Clinton's only crime appears to be that he had sex (or some variation on a sexual act) with someone who wasn't his wife. Big Deal

Re:Watergate still??

[thales]

Oh the Dems have some real "talent" for scandal but they keep getting nailed at the lower levals so they don't make the major leagues.

In One Atlanta Suburb the Shiref was caught up in one scandal after another. After he lost his bid for reelection the guy that beat him was ASSASSINATED, and he's on trial for ordering the hit now.

Re:Watergate still??

[hagardtroll]

Have you EVER seen a reporter get something right, which concerns your profession?

I couldn't agree more. I've read news reports of events that I attended, or things I have participated in. I am amazed at how often the reporter just gets it wrong. They either didn't bother to get enough background knowledge or didn't know WTF they were talking about.

Reporters know how to spell and make complete sentences, but they do NOT understand technology, micro-politics (What is going on in your neighborhood.) etc. I've found most general journalism to be useless.

How many people reporting from Afghanistan really understand the things going on there and understand the history of the place? I would suggest none, yet they get on the air and give their 5 minute wrap of useless information that we are supposed to be able to digest and make informed decisions about?

Bottom line is that main stream media is useless for really understanding a problem. You really need to dive in and research the details yourself if you want a true understanding of an issue.

Re:Watergate still??

[DarkProphet]

I live around the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro, one newspaper for each city. They keep each other in check, so both are pretty decent quality. Most of the state's bills are pretty boring, but at least you can read about them. Its nice to have a good idea of what 'those idiots at the capital' are actually up to. Unfortunately, neither newspaper keeps nearly as close tabs on federal government, but then, they be two different beasts. Both papers are pretty good about red-flaging bullshit bills like those usually proprosed by Sen. Hollings, and the fascist doings of Ashcroft and his pet Shrub.

Re:Watergate still??

[Theodrake]

I know this thread is old, but I believe the only difference between Kennedy/Johnson and Nixon was Nixon got caught.

Tapes can't be erased?

[tuxlove]

You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.

I have a blowtorch that says magnetic tape can be erased.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[Agthorr]

Yeah, but that won't help much once I finish developing my time machine. Merely physically destroying the tape won't be enough! I'll still be able to retrieve the original data.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[Alsee]

>You never completely erase a tape.
I have a blowtorch that says magnetic tape can be erased.

Maybe, maybe not. We'll have to wait another 30 years and see what the nanotech experts have to say about that.

-

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[Tower]

Ah - enough balefire and we can take care of that, too...

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[Agthorr]

Yeah, but then I can just use my time machine again to bug the conversation and make my own recording.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[denchen]

That's one whopping ball of balefire to erase 30 years! I better fish out that terangereal from my pocket.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[Jardine]

Just an explanation for people who haven't read the Wheel of Time series of books.

Balefire is a "spell" that causes whatever it hits to be destroyed before it hits it.

So if a man kills a women and you hit the man with strong enough balefire, the women will be alive because he was destroyed before he killed her.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[cdrj]

And then Ill time travel forward to before you time travel back forward after you have gone backward.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[EvanED]

(Taking the parent post much too seriously)

But then you have charges of destroying evidence to contend with. The tapes were subpoenaed, making destroying them illegal.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[tuxlove]

But then you have charges of destroying evidence to contend with. The tapes were subpoenaed, making destroying them illegal.

That's true, of course, but I always wondered why erasing them wasn't considered tantamount to destruction. Especially given that it's been established that the 18 minute section was repeatedly erased.

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[EvanED]

Or perhaps the gap was added before the subpoena was issued?

Either explanation seems reasonable... (the subpoena was for the tapes, not the data on them...)

Re:Tapes can't be erased?

[vr]

wow! you have a blowtorch that can talk? that's amazing, dude!

he was not impeached

[Edmund Blackadder]

he resigned and he was pardoned.

One could hardly say that justice was done, or that the whole truth was revealed.

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[deanj]

Uh, Nixon is dead. Want to dig him up to do that?

Fossil magnetism

[Bruce Perens]

You are confusing the digital logic with the analog magnetic media. On the disk, there are no bits, there are just differing levels of magnetism. So, by erasing a disk, you don't necessarily get 1 picogauss (or whatever) back to exactly zero across all of the molecules of the domain under the head. It turns out that you can use some very sensitive instruments like a superconducting quantum interference detector to read "fossil magnetism". Some physics student will come along and explain this better than I have :-)

Bruce

Re:Fossil magnetism

[Helmholtz Coil]

Hysteresis. Ferromagnetic materials carry a "memory" of their magnetic history. AFAIK that's the basic principle behind our ability to track the motion of the magnetic pole over millions of years.

Superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) are seriously cool...they can measure magnetic fields down to about 10^-10 gauss. They'll detect fields created by things like a fetal heartbeat or a car starting down the block.

Re:Fossil magnetism

[RegularFry]

And what triggers the heartbeats? Current flowing through the neural circuits.

Weird! I love Weird!

[Anonymous Coward]

Take that zombie Georg ^H^H^H Richard Nixon!!


(Oh, that's just such a huge target! Everyone knows he sold his soul to the devil, it only makes sense that he'd arise to walk among the undead.)

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[J4]

Oh, I dunno about that. What if it turns out Nixon
made some comment that incriminated him WRT getting JFK whacked for fixing the '60 election or maybe
admitting he was one of those reptilian space aliens
or some other whacky shit?

Gerald Ford tried too

[L. VeGas]

When Gerald Ford tried to erase *his* tapes, the pencil eraser kept getting caught on the sticky side.

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[grytpype]

Right. He resigned because he was about to be impeached.

Too bad for the Dems

[bubblegoose]

These tapes could have won Al Gore the Presidency. I heard these 18 1/2 minutes were Sen. Albert Gore Sr., introducing his son and Al Jr. discussing plans for the Internet

The deleted part

[peterdaly]

I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman...

Re:The deleted part

[sheepab]

I did not have a sexual relationship with that woman...
Um, if he went through that much trouble to delete it, wouldnt it be 'I did have a sexual relationship with that woman...'?

What was in the tapes

[mangu]

"Ohhh, Ahhh, Yeah Baby! Now!!!"

Oops, no, sorry, it was the Nixon tapes.

For all you non-USians out there

[The Ape With No Name]

Here are some links on this bit of US history. Good old Tricky Dicky made Bill Clinton look like a choir boy. At least Clinton never tried to circumvent democracy covertly or, for that matter, overtly (that we know).

Re:For all you non-USians out there

[The Ape With No Name]

I am a dual US-Greek citizen who has lived in Britain, Canada, Slovenia, Italy and Greece (I am currently back in the States). I have never been a member of the US armed forces. And I have heard every possible Non-US perspective on US History. They tend to be right, but not always.

Re:For all you non-USians out there

[attackiko]

You've been to slovenia, that is hind of cool

Re:For all you non-USians out there

[The Ape With No Name]

I have an apartment in Zelena Jama in Ljubljana on Vzajemna cesta. Right near the Zale cemetery and BTC. Wh00t!

Re:Alice's Restaurant is the answer!

[WellHungYungWun]

What the hell is the wrong with you? Don't drink the damned bong water.

Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[wrinkledshirt]

I think the most troubling thing about Watergate is that since then the amount of credible investigative journalism has dwindled to the point of non-existence. What is news is now determined by the corporate or political interests -- guys like the head of Fox saying that reporting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan doesn't do anyone any good, or John Ashcroft saying that criticizing the Bush administration is on par with helping the terrorists directly.

It's not just an American phenomenon. Up here in Canada two editors have been fired in last couple of years for writing editorials criticizing the Liberal government, because the two editors were working for a newspaper chain owned by Izzy Asper, a buddy of the PM. And as CNN goes international, you see them representing the conservative American viewpoint abroad, to the point of feeding a smear campaign against leaders like Pres. Chavez in Venezuela in their home country.

It's gotten so bad that the only people who openly criticize the powers that be have been largely marginalized (and then dismissed) as radical leftists -- Chomsky, Fisk, Moore, etc. These are brilliant guys with important questions, but the moment you mention their names the ad hominems commence as the argument degenerates into how big of a kook they are.

I guess the big question I have is, if a scandal like Watergate were to hit the ground, in the bustling forest of today's largely goose-stepping society, would it make a sound? I'm worried it wouldn't.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Edmund Blackadder]

Themost worryingthing isthat the same bob woodward is now busy writing puff pieces for the president.

There were plenty of potential scandals today much bigger than watergate that have not been investigated.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Fyndlorn]

"And as CNN goes international, you see them representing the conservative American viewpoint"

CNN represents the conservative american viewpoint...ha! thats a laugh

sorry

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[wizarddc]

Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

That easy, he's right here: http://www.drudgereport.com/

Re: Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[InitZero]

the amount of credible investigative journalism has dwindled to the point of non-existence.

In all seriousness, what Woodward and Bernstein did was not good journalism. In the end, they got it right, but it could have just as easily gone the other way.

W&B got lucky. Their All The President's Men is as often fiction as fact. If you read through their articles as they were printed (as I have as part of a number of journalism classes), you will come to understand that history has been very kind to them. They made a number of critical mistakes in their reporting.

They are cultural icons, changed the political landscape and are the answer to more than one trivia question so we must give them their due but their due isn't that of great journalists.

InitZero

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Edmund Blackadder]

yeah i cant waittill dredge reveals a scandal about the bush presidency.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Eliza Doolittle]

the big question I have is, if a scandal like Watergate were to hit the ground, ... would it make a sound? I'm worried it wouldn't.

I think it would. Clinton made a sound. The Gary Condi/Chandra Levy scandal made a sound.

If there is dirt around, the media will still expose it because that is what the viewers want ... and viewers equal money.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Lurkingrue]

CNN represents the conservative american viewpoint...ha! thats a laugh

Sorry to say, but they do -- ask any friends or family abroad how CNN is viewed overseas. I'd guess in most of the world they're seen on par with Al-Jazeera...and much of the world sees them as more biased. Even that supposed bastion of the Left, the New York Times, is very reluctant to criticize either Bush.

If you don't think the USian has their biases, you've got your head in the sand.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[squiggleslash]

From the right, there seems to be plenty, as the muckraking over the last presidency seemed to reveal. From the left, not a lot.

There's an active campaign to change that, but it's arguable all it will do is, together with the long time attacks by freepers on percieved left wing bias, simply batter journalists into a sort of don't-offend-anyone submission. Still, arguably, that's what we have right now: Especially if the right is right and most journalists position themselves left of center, they're definitely not writing as if they're left of center.

Not that I believe they are, or at least, not to the same extent as conservatives believe they are. FAIR did a survey in which they polled journalist's positions on various issues and compared them to the national average. They found that while journalists leant to the left/center in terms of the causes they supported - Medicare, Social Security, Taxes, etc, they were generally to the right of what studies generally showed were the American public's positions on the same issues. This probably goes some way towards explaining why even some of the more intelligent right wingers are convinced of a left wing bias to the press - it's to the left of them.

Why is this relevent? Well, right now criticising government means, by definition, being critical of and willing to question right wing Republican policies. And, except for a burst for the last month or so, there's been very, very, little criticism of the government. Even before 9/11, CNN was devoting something in the order of 50% of its TV coverage (evidence from memory) of a scandal involving a Democratic congressman where he lied to police during a murder investigation, and there simply was no news on that score - he lied, that was it. Nothing came in, but the same story was repeated and excuses were found to repeat it, over and over again. And Condit (for it is he) isn't exactly an important figure.

The press, at the moment, is in the hands of people who do not want powerful forces challenged. Right now, those powerful forces are those in government. Until and unless there's a change of hands, and journalists feel they can breath and be more free, there will not be another Woodward and Bernstein.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[TGK]

Keep in mind that if you wanted to find a liberal as liberal as the US definition in Europe you'd find a (european) conservitive. And to find a conservitive matching the US description you'd have to find a Nazi.

The Europeans are FAR more liberal than the US as a whole. Or, put another way, the US is far more conservitive than most other states in the world.

The other side of the coin is this. Though many US reporters and other such media icons are liberal (by our definition) the owners of those media outlets they represent are just as conservitive as Dubbya.

Don't think that all that much gets by those owners.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Boronx]

CNN is only liberal in comparison to Fox News, which is saying exactly nothing.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Boronx]

And Drudge has slept through the whole thing.e

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[SETIGuy]

Bob Woodward is currently steering the Washington Post away from anything that might be controversial or require investigative reporting.

The basic problem with american journalism is that no newsroom in the country funds investigative reporting. The typical daily assignment for a reporter is to digest a half dozen AP wire reports and half a dozen corporate press releases into a half dozen articles. Anything that takes more than a couple hours to investigate is off the table. Following leads is reduced to "calling the corporate/campaign press agent." If a story is denied by a press agent, it is usually dropped.

Editor: Let's see... We've got a President who's campaign was mainly directed by his former president father. This father likely had involvement in illegal covert activities in previous administrations, but the President is witholding any documents from those administrations. The President was elected by the miscount of votes in a state that is governed by his brother. This brother was directly involved in choosing which votes would be rejected and which would be counted. The election was finally decided by the Supreme Court. The bulk of the members of that court were installed by the previous administrations in which the President's father served. The bulk of the senior presonnel in the current administration worked in the previous administration. Lot's of dots to connect there, but it would certainly take more than an hour and a few hundred dollars to get to the bottom of it, so let's ignore it. Besides, it would annoy the conservative owners of this paper. Here, there's a new press release from Microsoft. Copy it verbatim.

Reporter: Sure thing, Boss!

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Boronx]

Iran Contra made a sound, Halliburton made a sound, AWOL Bush made a sound, insider trading Bush made a sound, lying to the American people Bush made a sound, Cocaine sniffing Bush made a sound, coward Bush made a sound...wait a minute, i got that backwards, they *didn't* make a sound, my bad.

Re: Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Paradise Pete]

history has been very kind to them. They made a number of critical mistakes in their reporting.

For example? (serious question)

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[Citizen of Earth]

It's not just an American phenomenon. Up here in Canada two editors have been fired in last couple of years for writing editorials criticizing the Liberal government, because the two editors were working for a newspaper chain owned by Izzy Asper, a buddy of the PM.

And it's a big ole scandal. Hell, even CNN reported it.

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[SETIGuy]

That easy, he's right here: http://www.drudgereport.com/ [drudgereport.com]

They were talking about Woodward and Bernstein the reporters, not Woodward, Oaklahoma and Leonard Bernstein.

Re: Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[InitZero]

For example? (serious question)

I highly recommend Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein by Adrian Havill. (It's is out of print according to Amazon.) It's part biography of Woodward and Bernstein and part discussion of Deep Throat. (Havill concludes Deep Throat was a composite character.)

The most amusing example from the book is the origin of the Deep Throat code name. Bernstein claims that he went to see Deep Throat in Washington, D.C. to evade a subpoena. Havill documents conclusively that Deep Throat wasn't showing anywhere in or near Washington, D.C. Not only was their source fake, the source of their fake source's nickname was also fake.

There are more examples in the Columbia Journalism Review article linked above or in today's gossip column on MSNBC.

InitZero

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[sean23007]

Actually, Nixon's America was very, very conservative in comparison to the Americas before and after (in a matter of speaking). Nobody was really saying anything bad about Nixon (according to what I've read, they really should have been), but when news about the scandal came out he lost all his support. I'm sure someone would make a sound if there was a huge scandal linked to the Bush administration.

On the other hand, the way things are going I wouldn't be too surprised if our right to free presses was removed if there were such a scandal. After all, terrorism. Right?

Re:Where are today's Woodward and Bernstein?

[neocon]

There were plenty of potential scandals today much bigger than watergate that have not been investigated.

Can you provide a single example? One?

reel to reel tape lifespan

[yppiz]

I thought reel to reel tape had a lifespan of under a decade until serious data loss. If the tape is already 30 years rotted, and was initially thoroughly wiped, is there much of a chance that they can recover anything? --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu

It's True! Re:Alice's Restaurant is the answer!

[shlong]

There's a version of Alice's Restaurant that I have on MP3 where Arlo talks about exactly this. He claims that during the Carter Inauguration, Chip Carter pulled him aside and noted that they had found an LP of 'Alice's Restaurant' in the library. Arlo goes on to joke, "So, how many things can you think of that are 18 1/2 minutes long?".

Re:It's True! Re:Alice's Restaurant is the answer!

[danewt1]

from arlo.net: But it took a long time until Arlo understood the true significance of his record's appearance in the Nixon library. Richard Nixon had been brought down by a gap in a tape, a gap that timed out at exactly 18 minutes and 20 seconds. And few things in the world of sound run precisely 18 minutes and 20 seconds. But one of the things that does run 18 minutes and 20 seconds is a little ditty recorded in 1967 by one Arlo Guthrie, a tale of dumped trash and draft-dodging and 27 8 x 10 colored glossy pictures and crime and punishment and the Group W be nch and a lady named Alice who lived in a church. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, now the truth can be told: It was the 'Alice's Restaurant Massacree' that Richard Nixon snipped from the Watergate tape, causing his downfall and toppling the government of the United States. Talk about payback.

Re:It's True! Re:Alice's Restaurant is the answer!

[thaigan]

Yes, when I saw him in concert about 14 years ago, that's exactly what he said.

Re:It's True! Re:Alice's Restaurant is the answer!

[Anonymous Coward]

You saw Richard Nixon in concert?

Why did he erase the tape anyway? Worried that the RIAA would find out he'd taped Alice's Restaurant and have him imprisoned for copyright violations?

and Deep Throat is...

[Zen Mastuh]

...why, it's Linda Lovelace [RIP].

Theory + practice

[ocie]

You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.

Bull puckey. If you record over a tape enough times you will erase the original information. Otherwise, a length of tape could hole an infinite amount of information.

OTOH, just because you 'can' erase a tape, doesn't mean that it was done in this case.

Re:Theory + practice

[Karna]

Err, a black _hole_ is about the only thing that can (theoretically of course) hold an infinite amount of information.

of course, the obligatory, "imagine a beowulf cluster of those ......." :))

Re:Theory + practice

[jcl5m]

The original statement is correct. A single recording is never "completely" destroyed. It becomes more difficult to extract with introduction other signals and noise. The amount of recoverable information shrinks exponentially with each generation but never reaches zero. The amount of recoverable data left from each recording is a geometric function and sums to a constant, not infinity as you so boldy proclaim. As technology improves we can get closer and closer to this theoretical constant, extracting data that was previously too difficult to recover.

Re:Theory + practice

[Jboy_24]

Well I think it should be brought up that erasing with white noise is a very poor way of 'erasing' data.

The best way to erase this tape is to first record over it with other speach by nixon repeatedly, then erase. Finally 'erasing' or destroying the orginal tapes of the speach used to overrecord. Or just have nixon over report with the same mic and equipment saying different things. Without a library of speach to XOR out of any recoverable signal, you'd get nothing. Ecentually you'd be encrypting it with a one time pad.

If you write something on paper, and want to cross it out so no one could read it, don't just squiggle over it, right dummy words until you can ready anything, then squiggle it all out.

Re:Theory + practice

[Jonny 290]

No! Not a Beowulf Cluster!

Raid Array! Raid Array!

"Why yes, i've got a two-way striped black hole Raid Array. Never fills up. Of course, it's write only, and I can't see it...."

Re:Theory + practice

[Frac]

Otherwise, a length of tape could hole an infinite amount of information.

Only if you tape over it an infinite number of times.

Re:Theory + practice

[ocie]

Repeat N times:
Rewind the tape
Record a message onto the tape

Now let's be pessimistic and assume that each message could only be recovered with 1 bit of information. After N loops, you have N bits. As N approaches infinity, the information approaches infinity too. Now in practice, the tape would surely break. But the contridiction shows that it should be possible _in theory_ to completely erase a length of tape.

Re:Words of Stupidity From Tom Ridge #@ +1 ; Neat

[cats]

yep,but Congress is just as eager to trample our fundamental rights in order to get re-elected for being "tough on terrorists" and the slack jawed yokels of amerika will be just as willing to re-elect them when the time comes.

We sell our rights away day by day and soon we will ALL be up against the wall.

Lest anyone think I am a red or a liberal, nay my friends I am not affiliated with any politcal ideology other than that of personal freedom. My personal freedom should go unchecked until it interferes with another persons freedom. So I should be allowed to own a friggin howitzer as long as I do not go and blow craters in my neighbors yard or endanger his kids with my test firing of said howitzer.

People might think this is Libertarian, but I rather think it is called common sense.

Could we say...

[frenchs]

...that they are going to employ a beowouf cluster of audio experts?

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[grytpype]

Following up on my own post:

Nixon resigned after he was told that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict him. So he was a lot closer to the edge of the cliff than Clinton, who was impeached on a party-line vote and acquitted by the Senate. The votes in the Senate weren't even close to the 2/3 supermajority needed to convict him.

Erased?

[lingqi]

I am not sure if this information is accurate or not -- but i know i got it from a social science course somewhere --

the tape wasn't just "erased" -- it was recorded with white noise, probabbly 20 times over. they tried to recover it but couldn't at that time. If it really is iteratively recording white noise, i doubt even today's computers will make much of a difference -- sure the computers are *faster* and what not -- but even back then, analog filters are just as good as digital filters these days -- takse a while longer, but if you do it right the quality should be similar. (and being a govn't investigation, i would bet they had the best of the best pouring over that tape.

Re:Erased?

[EvanED]

OK, you've got some facts wrong: >>it was recorded with white noise It was recorded with the mic unpluged. Don't know if that would result in white noise or not, but there was no deliberatly created white noise. >>probabbly 20 times over A panel of experts put it at 9-11 times. (It was all an accident, of course.) >>If it really is iteratively recording white noise, i doubt even today's computers will make much of a difference -- sure the computers are *faster* and what not -- but even back then, analog filters are just as good as digital filters these days -- takse a while longer, but if you do it right the quality should be similar. Unless you need to make multiple passes. Analog recordings deterioriate with each pass. Also, it's not just the filter tech that may make the difference. A Discovery Channel show on Watergate had a segment on the recovery efforts, and the gey they were talking to described how if given the task of restoring the recording, they'll place 150-200 read heads all over the tape for a super-accurate recording. Each pickup will go to a separate channel in the computer. >>and being a govn't investigation, i would bet they had the best of the best pouring over that tape. Finally, it *isn't* an government investigation. The National Archives made a challenge to private sector businesses to do it. They made a test tape, using the same kind of equipment and media used originally and gave it to anyone who's interested. The Archives will pick the group most likely to suceed to give the actual tape to. But it's not being done my the government.

Re:Erased?

[EvanED]

Sheesh... I keep forgetting to choose text from the pull-down menu below, so my paragraphs run together. (Yes, I am pretty new here...)

Here's a re-post formatted correctly:

OK, you've got some facts wrong:

>>it was recorded with white noise

It was recorded with the mic unpluged. Don't know if that would result in white noise or not, but there was no deliberatly created white noise.

>>probabbly 20 times over

A panel of experts (in Nixon's era) put it at 9-11 times. (It was all an accident, of course.)

>>If it really is iteratively recording white noise, i doubt even today's computers will make much of a difference -- sure the computers are *faster* and what not -- but even back then, analog filters are just as good as digital filters these days -- takse a while longer, but if you do it right the quality should be similar.

Unless you need to make multiple passes. Analog recordings deterioriate with each pass. Also, it's not just the filter tech that may make the difference. A Discovery Channel show on Watergate had a segment on the recovery efforts, and the gey they were talking to described how if given the task of restoring the recording, they'll place 150-200 read heads all over the tape for a super-accurate recording. Each pickup will go to a separate channel in the computer.

>>and being a govn't investigation, i would bet they had the best of the best pouring over that tape.

Finally, it *isn't* an government investigation. The National Archives made a challenge to private sector businesses to do it. They made a test tape, using the same kind of equipment and media used originally and gave it to anyone who's interested. The Archives will pick the group most likely to suceed to give the actual tape to. But it's not being done my the government.

What could it contain?

[rjamestaylor]

Admission that the break-in occured? Commands to cover the op up? Or evidence that Nixon was simply a pawn and had no control over his "aides" who actually ran the Shadow Government?

Other theories, anyone?

Agency of Fear

[nesthigh]

Here is a great online book with the history of Nixon's rise, abuse, and fall, for those of you who aren't familiar with all the details.It's 35 chapters long and covers the whole "drug war" and the incidents leading to Watergate very well.

enjoy!

I wonder.

[vegetablespork]

What will the parts of the tape that were previously "erased" say played backward? Will we hear what we've suspected all along, Nixon and Schlesinger celebrating black masses and sacrificing goats?

Right you are

[The Ape With No Name]

At least millions of innocents didn't die.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/18/kiss inger/

Tape lifespan

[Johnboi Waltune]

I recently uncovered a cache of cassette tapes that my family had recorded together 24 years ago. They all played in an old Sony Walkman I borrowed from a friend. I ripped them all to 32kbps MP3's, and they sound OK. So it's reasonable that audio tape can survive almost 30 years, not 10 years like someone was saying.

Ironically enough

[spudwiser]

It's 18.5 minutes of static. Nixon was in the can.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This was already solved.

[MongooseCN]

The movie Dick exposed this years ago.

Here is what it says

[jazman_777]

Number 9... number 9... number 9... number 9...

Show about tape recovery on Discovery Channel

[Imabug]

There as a show on the Discovery Channel last night (17Jun02) that was talking about efforts to recover the contents of the erased tape. It was quite interesting. Not quite sure what the show was called, because I missed the first 10 minutes of it.

There was a very informative interview with somebody from one of the companies competing for the project. They used some pretty sophisticated computer processing and filtering algorithms on other tapes and actually could recover intelligible conversations.

The companies competing for the project are going to have to prove they are capable of recovering an erased tape by using a demo tape that was erased with the same tape recorder used by Nixon.

The guy they interviewed was talking about building a specialized unit with a bunch of read heads that would be used to digitize audio from the erased tape (reading the tape in DLT fashion it seemed).

Re:Show about tape recovery on Discovery Channel

[Animats]

That "bandpass filter" thing sounds bogus to me.

Audio tape recorders of that era had separate erase and record heads. The erase head was ahead of the record head, and erased a slightly wider track than the record/play head. The erase head also had a bigger gap than the read/write head, and was driven by an audio oscillator. Ideally, the erase head was driven hard enough to saturate the tape. So the effect was that the particles in the gap were all magnetized one way, then the other, several times during the pass over the erase head.

So what do you look for? Maybe there's some residual recording outside the track boundary. Maybe the particles in the tape represent a range of permeabilities, so that some of the particles didn't get saturated and retain some signal. There's the possibility that the erase head didn't saturate the tape, although on a good recorder you expect it to.

oh give me a break...

[synshyne]

are you serious? next your gonna ask if they are gonna dig Nixon up for a retry....come on!!
history is history...and its important to know and study so we dont screw up again in the future...uncovering facts no matter how long it takes or how modern of technology we have to use is nessacary to "get the story straight" as to say..you dont want to have to explain anything in detail without knowing all the facts would you?
so yea, uncovering this information is actually very important...

besides who knows whats missing on that tape..could be some really good stuff to gossip about for the next 30 years....

an attempt at objectivity

[Pauly]

AltaVista:
Republican Scandal 49,798 hits
Democratic Scandal 258,173 hits

Google:
Republican Scandal 108,000 hits
Democratic Scandal 162,000 hits

Re:an attempt at objectivity

[Mr Windows]

It must be true! Google told me so!

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[MaxVlast]

Hehe. Reptilian space aliens. How many people know about them? All our leaders are part of the cult.

working link

[Pauly]

The full op-ed piece can be found here

You can also use the fact that....

[Newer Guy]

no two record/erase heads are in exact alignment with those on other machines therefore, it's almost impossible to completely erase an analog tape by recording over it unless you're using the same machine it was recorded on . Some small part of that oxide still has some tiny part of the original recording. For example, In the early 70's I had an important full track mono tape that someone had recorded over in quarter track stereo. By changing the height of the playback head on my quarter track machine, I was able to find an area on the tape that hadn't been erased. Sure it didn't sound too good, but what I wanted was the content more then the fidelity. Of course, when I was done I then had to re-align the head to make it compatible with the rest of the world.

Recovery techniques?

[TTop]

Where can one find more information on how to execute the type of recoveries that the guy was talking about? band pass filters, etc. I'm interested in specific techniques, not generalities. Also interested in specific techniques on how to clean up bad audio (I know some but it can't hurt to know more, can it?)

It's stupid to commemorate Watergate NOW

[gdyas]

The dumb thing about celebrating Watergate now, the 30th anniversary of the break-in, is that 99.999% of the public had set it aside in their minds soon after it happened. Celebrating this week is like celebrating our own stupidity. Except for two police beat reporters for the Washington Post nobody gave a shit for a good 1.5 years. We should celebrate sometime in late 2003, the 30th anniversary of when we collectively woke the fuck up.

I'd also like to direct everyone to Woodstein's fantastic book, All the President's Men. Quick & easy read, and it captures like nothing else the discovery of the thing in all its surreal glory.

I saw a device that truly can erase anything..

[Newer Guy]

It works by using a huge capacitor bank to create an EMP pulse inside a cavity. You open up a door and put in your medium (tape, hard drive, etc.) close the door and push the button. The EMP produced erases the item to the highest security level the Govt has. Needless to say, these devices are quite expensive and the US Govt. is their largest customer.

Re:I saw a device that truly can erase anything..

[freaker_TuC]

I wonder how much will be left of the circuitry of a harddrive ... there is still a pcb with IC's on it ...

Okay, I guess I have to explain this

[bigsexyjoe]

Impeachment is not getting thrown out of office. The congress impeaches the president. After impeachment there is a Senate hearing and the Senate can remove the president from office.

A good analogy if someone be accused of a crime. Impeachment would be analagous to incitement and removal from office would be analoagous to being found guilty.

Nixon and Clinton were both impeached.

I don't mean to be an ass, but it is not okay for adults or even teenagers to not know this. I get mad about techies who don't know this just as I get mad when normals brag about being bad at math. Of course it is also not okay to spell as badly as I do.

Grytpype's comment should be modded down to 1; it is incorrect.

Re:Okay, I guess I have to explain this

[geekoid]

you would think that after clinton everybody would know what it meant to be impeached.

"when normals brag about being bad at math"
normals?
It also says something of somebody when they define there self in such an elitest way.

Re:Okay, I guess I have to explain this

[grytpype]

Nixon was not impeached! Clinton was the first president to be impeached since Andrew Jackson, look it up for Glubs' sake!

Re:Okay, I guess I have to explain this

[imyourstruly]

...incitement.

Did you mean to say indictment?

Nixon was not impeached. There are books to look up these types of things, you know. Did you actually say someone else should be modded down for being incorrect?

Maybe because those were fabricated?

[sheldon]

The Foster suicide has been investigated numerous times by numerous agencies and even news organizations. In each and every case, the conclusion was the same... he committed suicide.

You might be interested to read David Brock's new book "Blinded by the right", where he goes through a lot of these stories and shows how the right-wing media worked to fabricate them, and how uncredible most of the "witnesses" really were.

DICK NIXON!!!...before he dicks you!!!

[Newer Guy]

What was that joke....? oh yeah... Q: Why did Nixon see the movie "Deep Throat" ? A: He wanted to get it down Pat.

Re:ok

[MindStalker]

Sadly the average American knows nothing about that. But then again, honestly it wasn't a scandle, everyone knew about it. It was a different society back then, honestly if it wasn't for the proliferation of civil rights fighters right now, this country would have imprisioned every muslim post 9/11 and the average american would have thought nothing about it.

That's not the reason

[epepke]

Watergate is a big deal for the same reason that some people think Bob Dylan can sing: it's a Baby Boomer thing. First the Baby Boomers discovered color, sex, civil rights, and opposition to the war. Then they discovered political scandal, and that was Watergate. By the time Reagan came around, they had discovered cocaine, tax-free municipal bonds, and all-white neighborhoods, so they didn't notice.

Re:That's not the reason

[Luyseyal]

Recently they've discovered Social Security benefits and cheap prescription drugs -- hedging their greyed future on the backs of their children. Sickening, really. I love my parents and I'm going to care for them, but I'd rather not fork out cash for a bunch of lazy slobs and Congressional pork.

-l

Re:Words of Stupidity From Tom Ridge #@ +1 ; Neat

[mark_lybarger]

My personal freedom should go unchecked until it interferes with another persons freedom

it's the bold piece that everyone is constantly at war over. at least that's how it's presented to us.

1. a national id system isn't to restrict your personal freedoms, but rather to protect the freedoms that a nation of peoples have enjoyed for so long.

1. your inability to own a howitzer isn't interfering with your rights to freedom as it is protecting others rights from your
2. potential use.

1. your right to have non-monopolistic business practices from a
2. major OS vendor is not as important as the security of the nation since releasing the source code could compromise national security.

ok the last one's really stretching it, but really, i agree with you. that line of interferance needs to be clearly defined and kept in check.

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[geekoid]

it makes sense if you bother to learn the definition of impeach

What would Jack Handey do?

[robotpants]

"If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go because, man, they're gone."

Informative, but wrong

[Macrobat]

The House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment in July 1974 against Nixon because of the break-in and the cover-up. Nixon resigned August 9th, 1974, (the day I got my tonsils out) before the full House could vote on the articles.

I don't mean to be an ass, but it is not okay for adults or even teenagers to not know this.

Don't throw that first stone...

Gee

[gotak]

Do you guys watch @discovery.ca a few weeks after it'a aired?

This story was on that show like last month.

Re:Yearg! The man was impeached, leave him alone!

[Boronx]

A majority of senators, in a Republican controlled senate, aquitted him.

Re:a job for Linux?

[Jonny 290]

I do think that some low-level filtering software a la csound would do wonders; however, linux is sorely lacking in audio tools. Wintel and MacOS are where it's at, and I wouldn't even think about Macs for this kind of situation.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

In practice what he says is correct.

[Chuck Chunder]

In practice people don't erase/record over a tape enough to erase the original information. The effort and time involved in doing so is non-negligable so in practice people don't do it.

If the data on the tape were that important, if you had the opportunity and if you knew that recording over the top would not work unless you did it a lot and with the right sort of sounds you'd simply destroy the tape, ie by converting it to a pile of ash and smoke, dissolving it in acid or otherwise rendering it chemically different from it's original state.

It may be possible to record over a tape to the degree that the original data becomes unrecoverable with any degree of certainty, but it remains impractical to do so.

put the recording online

[CurtisLeeFulton]

The archivists should use a high-res data acquisition card to sample the 18.5 minutes on the tape, then make the data available online or on CD-ROMs so hackers can take a crack at it.

Do-It-Yourself Audio Forensics

[QuietRiot]

Good audio forensics training. Check it out.

www.baudline.com has a selection of Mystery Signals for you to try and identify what they are. Help is provided on how to use the program [called, appropriately enough, 'Baudline'] to isolate, filter, and massage the sound in various ways to figure out what it really is.

It is a sound analysis toolkit that is very flexible and is targeted at audio signal analysis, not editing. See more details here.

Anyway, their Mystery Signals are pretty fun to play with and try to figure out. Hints are provided, as are answers if you choose to look. The explanation provided for this file is:

This mystery signal is the sound of the harmonic oscillations of a surf board strapped to the roof of a rental car that is slowly accelerating. There are two signals of interest here. Let's break it down. The 4 cylinder rental car accelerates from about 30 MPH at the start to about 50 MPH at the end of the file. Switching to a 16384 point FFT size will help bring out the detail. The first signal starts at 80 Hz and it slowly increases in a linear fashion to 88 Hz at the 12 second mark. Using the harmonic helper bars, the 3rd harmonic is the strongest, but the 2nd and 4th are faintly visble. This is the sound of the car engine reving from 2400 to 2640 RPM. Then at the 12 second mark a transition that takes about 3/4 of a second occurs, this is the gear shift of the automatic transmission. The new new fundemental is about 70 Hz and it slowly increases again in a linear fashion to 74 Hz where the file ends. This equates to an increase in engine rev speed from 2100 RPM to 2220 RPM. The acceleration was slow and the RPM calculations match the behavior one would expect from a low performance 4 cylinder rental car with an automatic transmission. The second signal of interest starts at 128 Hz and time zero. Things are fairly calm and the coupled surf board, springy strap, and rental car roof speaker cone are just starting to hum and oscillate. The harmonic helper bars show that the fundamental and the 2nd thru the 6th harmonic are all related. Tracking the wiggles of the fundamental over time show that and they match the variations in the harmonics perfectly. As the car speeds up the lift and the wind force on the surf board increases and the wild harmonic oscillations increase in strength and frequency. There could be some chaos here, it looks like some bifurcation of modulation modes are happening, but some further measurements and analysis is required to say for sure. This mystery signal was recorded on a Canon S110 digital camera in low resolution movie mode. Baudline can read the Canon .AVI movie files and automatically extract the audio. In 160x120 low res mode the S110 can record for 30 seconds which which when coupled with baudline makes it an excellent portable sound recording device. The Canon S110 sound samples are 8-bit at a 11024 sample rate. Looking at the histogram you can see the huge negative DC offset lopsidedness and that every other bin is zero. The even odd bin holes show that the signal originally was 8 bit sampled. The DC offset is most likely caused by a firmware bug in the camera. In the frequency domain this DC offset equates to a strong 0 Hz tone which can visually ignored or corrected with the equalization window.

Program Features:
* 192 kHz real-time bandwidth * 96 dB dynamic range * Multiple sound card support * Input stream DC offset correction and delay line equalization * Configurable input channels that can perform various operations * Frequency, time, amplitude, and sample probability distribution analysis * High speed displays * Test signal generation * Drift Integration "de-chirping" * Audio player o looping o speed control with multirate resampling o pitch scaling o heterodyning (frequency shifting) o 2D matrix surround panning o notch, high, and low pass filters * File loading o file formats: .wav, .aiff, .au, .al, .snd, .voc, .rmd, . pvf, .mp3, ID3, .ogg, .gsm, .sah, raw, .avi, .mov o channels: mono, stereo, ... up to 9 channels o data formats: ASCII decimal, A-law, u-law, 1-bit (msb & lsb), 8-bit (signed & unsigned), 16/24/32-bit integer (little & big endian), float, double o compression + lossless suffixes: .gz, .bz2, .Z, .zip, .flac + codecs: ADPCM, GSM, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis

Grab the latest binary(only) here or find it in the BSD Ports.

Burn 'em!

[Robber Baron]

Why in hell didn't he simply burn them?

One Legacy of Watergate

[mks113]

On CBC the other night (paraphrased): One Legacy of Watergate has been an easy way to name political scandals.

You can with a bulk tape eraser.

[Futurepower(R)]

"You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't."

This is wrong. You can't erase a tape completly very easily with a tape recorder, but you can with a bulk tape eraser.

Problem Solved....

[thumbtack]

18 1/2 minutes of tape missing....
Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie ) 18 1/2 minutes...

Hmmmmm......... I wonder if brownies were the White House snack that day?

Re:Problem Solved....

[SeppMosh]

On some live recording available on arlo.net, Arlo reveals that he has evidence the Nixon in fact owned a copy of Alice's Restaurant...

You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant...

Nixon's recording system is STILL WORKING...

[Artifice_Eternity]

...thanks to a top secret DARPA project, unknown till now.

Here's a look at what it's been recording recently in the Oval Office...

;)

You never completely erase a tape...

[Lord Bitman]

Though, after 30 years, physics erases it for you.

Bad moderation (should be "Funny")

[Saint Fnordius]

Buddy, your tinfoil-hat rantings about the whole Iran-Contra scandal and Nixon's saintliness seem to suggest that you've been in the GOP's Orbital Mind Control Laser Test Range a little too long.

Seriously, you seem to miss the gist of Watergate, namely that it was a huge shakeup of political faith, where Nixon and his associates were suddenly viewed as corrupt, paranoid and willing to commit major crimes to stay in power. It was the first such scarring of the American psyche, and the reason why all other scandals carry "-gate" as a pseudo-clever suffix.

Iran-Contra is remembered not only because it was undeniably illegal (don't forget that Ollie North was convicted), but because of how it became a lose-lose situation for Reagan in the long run: either he wasn't aware of what his aides were planning, or he knowingly broke the law. His presidency is now often regarded as "asleep at the wheel" by pundits because of this.

Clinton's scandals are notable because they dealt with relatively trivial matters being used as political weapons. The bitterness of the attackers and the defenders is said to have eroded public trust in both parties (and played a direct role in the last presidential election). It is also noted for eroding the world's view of the US, for who else but the prudish Americans would make a national crisis out of a person's sex life?

I suppose I've given you more of an answer than you deserve, but you need to realise that the rest of this planet doesn't quite think like you do. Watergate was a grand drama, to which the Clinton scandals are merely petty soap opera.

only 16% know what Watergate is

[peter303]

A poll of people born after 1965 found that only 16% knew the main facts of Watergate. The same poll increased to 60% for those born earlier.
Almost any major historical event has a similar recognition depending on whether one has lived through it or not.

Where do they come up with these names???

[brsmith4]

I have just two words: "Deep throat".

Conspiracy and coincidence

[karb]

Are often confused. If there was a shred of evidence that anything shady was going on, I'm sure the media would be all over it. The media tends to do the opposite, however. They report a few things that lead people to believe a conspiracy may exist, and then quit reporting when actual facts run out, or the original allegations turn out to be false.

For example, all of the reported allegations of intimidation or corruption in the florida 2000 elections were found to be false. But the mainstream press never reported that (or at least never reported it loudly).

Re:Conspiracy and coincidence

[SETIGuy]

For example, all of the reported allegations of intimidation or corruption in the florida 2000 elections were found to be false. But the mainstream press never reported that (or at least never reported it loudly).

Let's see what the international press (at least some of which still does investigative journalism) has to say on the subject.

BBC: [Regarding lists of preported felons that were prevented from voting] This is Database Technologies. This is the company that the state of Florida hired to remove the names of people who committed serious crimes from the voter lists. I have obtained a document marked "confidential and trade secret". It says the company was paid millions of dollars to make telephone calls to verify they got the right names - but they didn't. There is nothing in the state of Florida files that says they made these telephone calls. So the question remains, why did the Republican leaders of this state pay millions for a list that stopped thousands of innocent Democrats from voting?

More details here

Re:Conspiracy and coincidence

[karb]

I would say that there is a huge difference between voters being un-registered and voters being deliberately un-registered for political gain. Every state, not just florida, had many flaws in the election. To point to a particular state and say "Look at all the voting problems in this state that's governed by _republicans_, it must be a conspiracy" is problematic. With no more evidence than that, allegations of intimidation or corruption are pretty much groundless.

Re:Conspiracy and coincidence

[SETIGuy]

Let's see... The company that verified the names of felons in the previous election charged $7000. Then the contract was given to the 'not so low' bidder for several million dollars. And they 'forgot' to do it. That doesn't seem suspicious at all.

Electronics is also destroyed by the pulse...

[Newer Guy]

They did tell me that if a hard drive was put into this that all the semicondictors within said unit would also likely be destroyed....