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White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling
oscarcar writes "Dan Gillmor is reporting on the White House website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere."
Queue somebody to take a crawler (hell, even a bash script using wget) to specifically archive these pages. Hell, they could even use a user-agent which doesn't look like a bot.
Of course, people would be less likely to trust random-Joe from the Internet than, say, The Wayback Machine, but I expect this is what will happen...
If this was some crazy government conspiracy and they were trying to hide the information, why would they put it on their website? Could be any number of reasons they have done this perhaps they were getting loads of hits from google about iraq related things but if anyone really wants the information surely they can just visit it.
--
On Slashdot I'm a lawyer.
American people should have some say in a situation like went on in Iraq.
They do, it's called voting, not to mention public opinion polls, which were near 70% for the invasion when the US invaded.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Nothing's hidden, it's all there, it's all searchable from the white house website, just not from search engines.
I have to admit, when I first read the story I thought someone was being paranoid. But you really should RTF robots.txt file before you accuse the poster of being paranoid. The disallowed files are extraordinarily specific. I really can't come up with a plausible explanation beyond simoniker's.
It could be something innocent but really, why would anyone want to keep search engines out of a publicly funded website? People have been accusing the poster of "baseless accusations" but the guy does have a point. I've seen a couple of GW's speeches and afterwards the transcripts of those speeches and noted that gramatical errors were corrected. While this is only a minor offence in editing history it does make you wonder what other opinions and information may have appeared and then later have been edited. Seriously, these are our government officials here, we deserve to have an unedited record of what they say and to hold them to it. A little bit of speculation on the reasons for excluding various terms is far from paranoia.
Chris
Nosirree, no legitimate webmaster would ever use robots.txt to gently guide visiting bots to the appropriate parts of the site and to keep them from trying to do silly things. The only possible use is to trample your rights while installing the new corporate-owned government.
Geez, people. Honestly.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Keep telling yourself that.
And 70% of the people in this country STILL think that Saddam played some part in 9/11. What was your point again?
Better explanation: Someone screwed up a search-and-replace in a major way. Many (most?) of those pages with "iraq" in them don't exist.
It looks like someone blocked off parts of the site to web-crawlers; I don't know for sure why all those blah/bloo/iraq entries are in there but they sure as hell don't lead to anything.
Censorship: 0
Screwups: 100
what's that old saying? "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity" or something like that?
let's not get reactionary here, folks. it wouldn't make sense to do what's being alleged:
1. every major journalist worth his/her salt would be all over it within hours. so it wouldn't succeed in obscuring information.
2. it would create an incredible backlash as soon as detected. what purpose would this serve?
ed
# robots.txt for http://www.ingsoc.gov/
/cgi-bin /search /query.html /help /appointments/eurasia /appointments/eastasia /ask/images/eurasia /ask/images/eastasia /deptofhomeland/analysis/eurasia /deptofhomeland/analysis/eastasia /deptofhomeland/eurasia /deptofhomeland/eastasia /economy/eurasia /economy/eastasia /goodbye/eurasia /goodbye/eastasia /government/handbook/eurasia /government/handbook/eastasia /government/images/eurasia /government/images/eastasia /government/eurasia /government/eastasia
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
And now, an offering for the lameness filter...
Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound tracks, photographs- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors; meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing onto the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat-enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.
This was written in 1948. Things have really progressed!
It really doesn't look like it. It looks like someone screwed up, because none of those directories appear to exist at all. I mean really, what are the chances of /firstlady/photos/2003/01/iraq actually having at some time contained real data?
It looks like someone did a
find . -type d|perl -e 'while(<>){print "${_}/iraq\n"; print "${_}/text\n";}' > robots.txt
I have no idea what the purpose would be, but it seems like a funny thing to do if you were trying to hide something.
By the way, who is going around looking at people's robots.txt files?
Engineering and the Ultimate
Paranoia aside, I object to these restrictions as a matter of principle. They're making it more difficult to access publically available information. It's not classified, and it never was. I, as a citizen of the U.S.A., have a right to know what my leaders have said and done.
Let's assume the whitehouse.gov search engine is completely honest, and faithfully returns a complete listing of all materials on the site having to do with Iraq. If that's so, then there should be no reason to disable other search engines, since their results would just confirm the internal results.
But the restrictions are in place, meaning that someone thought there was a good reason to do so. Restricting access makes it more difficult for people to research information pertaining to Iraq on the whitehouse.gov web site. Who are the people most likely to be doing that? Answer: journalists, activists, and concerned citizens. Obviously these restrictions aren't enough by themselves to dissuade a determined researcher; but it might slow them down. And it might actually stop a diffident researcher completely.
I'm not even going to go into scenarios where the whitehouse.gov search engine is not trustworthy, because serving up "doctored" speeches or information is highly unlikely. There are too many other archives to compare against, and it would be a major scandal if the administration was found to be altering records on its website. They'd have to be really, really dumb to do that.
The whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.
"1. every major journalist worth his/her salt would be all over it within hours."
Don't be naive. How long do you think that any mainstream journalist who made a story of this would have a job for? The answer - not long. The US media in particular, although the UK is getting as bad, is little more than a relay system for government propaganda and real, detailed, complete examination of government behaviour, with equal air time to truly dissenting opinions (how many times has Chomsky been on CNN in the past 4 months?) is out of the question. What the government does is Good and Right and Should Not Be Questioned.
Media by the elite, serving the elite.
The other rule for transparency is that all material information be made available, kept, or destroyed in accordance to public regulation and individual policy. Individual policy must be consistent and decisions must be defensible based on policy.
The fact that people do not understand these two aspectsof transparency are what allow situations like Enron to develop. The later is what caused the destruction of Arthur Anderson. They have done nothing wrong, but they did not follow their own policy on document destruction, which made then look like at best idiots and at worst criminals.
We may compare this to other ventures to suggest policy. The NYT does not want google to cache articles because the NYT sells those articles after a certain time. Many other companies do not want deep linking because it reduces ad revenue. A fascist government may want to insure all users enter their site from a top page to make sure all users must go through the daily propaganda. A library tries hard to not track patrons so that no is afraid of using the library. The rational of the White House is beyond me.
The White House is not hiding documents. However, they are reducing the transparency of the government by limiting the avenues by which the public may access documents. Since the White House has stated many times that it believes in transparency, and in fact requires transparency when dealing with other governments, one can stipulate that transparency is the appropriate standard. So, until someone comes up with a policy that was developed and vetted through the normal processes used in the U.S., one has every reason to suspect nefarious motives.
And, if I may modify a statement that conservatives like to make, if you do not like transparency, go move to Iraq.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
An honourable country would not keep people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without either giving them PoW status or charging them with a specific offence and giving them the right to a fair trial, including free, unhindered and unmonitored access to legal counsel.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Sorry, I'm with Al Franken on him. (though Ivins is great!)
"I think he's mean. I think we're all too ready to blame Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney, or Ari Fleischer, or Gale Norton, or Donald Rumsfeld, or John Ashcroft when this administration does something despicable. When South Carolinians get push polls saying John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child, you know Karl Rove had something to do with it. But it's really Bush. When our energy policy is set by cronies from the oil, coal, and automobile industries, you can shake your fist at Dick Cheney. But it's Bush. When Ari Fleischer feeds rumors that the Clinton people vandalized the White House, doing $200,000 worth of damage, but month later a GAO report say that ain't true, you can say that Ari Fleisher is a chimp. And he is. But it's Bush."
...
"And I'm through with him."
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
http://www.bway.net/~keith/whrobots/disdirs.html And, yes these files *are* relevant.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Nobody thinks Bush and Cheney are updating the website. Jeeze. But the folks that are running the website (and I would bet this extends down to the actual webmaster/tech guy) are political appointees who are there to make the president look good. That is their job. Their actions are all filtered through this political role.
Let's present an alternate scenario - since you have no evidence for yours, I don't have to present any evidence for mine.
It's May - Pres. makes his speech on the Carrier, the assumption by those-in-charge are that Chalabi's government will have control of the country within a couple of weeks and the US troops will be heading on home. The web folks (who want to make B & C look good) declare "combat's done! the troops are coming home! re-elect Bush!"
A few months later, that rosy scenario hasn't quite panned out. The aircraft carrier speech is becoming a liability for Bush - people started counting the number of dead troops in Iraq since he gave the speech, and it keeps going up. The web folks (who want to make B & C look good) say to themselves "this is a potential embarrassment to the president - let's see how we can make it less embarrassing."
And there you have it.
To be a POW you have to have been captured wearing a recognisable uniform, and be part of an established fighting force of a government.
I suspect that many of the people captured met neither condition.
In which case they should be charged with something, either spying (unlikely if they were in their own country) or something else. They should then have the opportunity to defend themselves in open court with the ability to avail themselves of all the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which the US has signed up to. If US soldiers in Britain arrested me, I would not be wearing a recognisable uniform because I am not part of the military or any recognisable fighting force of government. That does not give them the right to forcibly remove me from my home country and lock me up without ever even charging me with anything! The actions of Bush and his cohorts in the Whitehouse are absolutely disgusting.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
Well terrorists have been attacking us since we have been in Iraq till this point in time, but i guess that doesnt mean there is any link..... naaaah
Native people fighting against an occupying force are known as freedom fighters, not terrorists.
ry again sparky.