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Memory Holes and the Internet (updated)
blamanj writes "As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem. A recent Slashdot article discussed this in regard to the White House. Now, The Memory Hole has noticed that Time magazine has pulled an article by Bush, Sr. on why it was a bad idea to try and overthrow Saddam. How can we keep corporate America honest?" Update: 11/11 22:16 GMT by T : Declan McCullagh (former Time, Inc. employee, among other things) writes in with the non-conspiracy explanation for the change, below.
Declan writes "It is silly to claim that Bush Sr. and Scowcroft would strong-arm Time Inc. into removing an article from time.com -- when that article was an excerpt from their book that you can buy today from Amazon.com for $21.
Another explanation is more likely. And, yes, a quick search turns up a May 2003 article from Slate that debunks this rumor. It turns out that Time Inc. only had permission from the publisher to post the content for a limited time."
The White House relies more than many previous administrations on the power of "top secret", and it should surprise no-one if they extend legislation like the Patriot Act into civil domains such as the Internet.
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Isn't it the prerogative of the private sector to publish at will? This is done all the time in print and television media. Should be no surprise that certain things get "omitted" on an Internet site.
> Folks, not every move by a (liberal) magazine such as Time is because of the Bush cabal and their black helicopter enforcers.
Care to present an alternate reason why it's missing, then?
Virg
How can you tell when a corporate suit (or lawyer, President, elected official, etc.) is not telling the truth?
Answer: His/Her lips move.
Lets face it, nobody wants to "Look bad" and if they can alter the records to "help you" forget what they said/did, they will do it. It's what keeps them in power and in control.
Or did we forget that its the winners that write the history books.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
Print publications follow the standard procedure of publishing official correction and retraction notices, but there doesn't seem to be any such standard convention in the online world. Some publications act more ethically than others. All should at least place a note at the top of an article if it has been changed, and withdrawn articles should have a withdrawal notice instead of a 404 page.
Please everyone: Follow the link to the pulled article. When it returns the 404 page, type "George Orwell" into the search box.
Someone at Time should take notice. (And no, we have never been at war with Oceania...)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Circumstances change. At that time, yeah, an invasion and occupation would probably have pissed off all the other Coalition members. It would have been the right thing to do, but would have cost us.
This time around it's a little different. We're much better prepared, and despite all the hopes and dreams of Slashdot readers and liberals everywhere, we're doing pretty well so far. Funny that those who were so loathe to take Saddam to task for anything for so many years are now screaming for instant results and claiming total failure so quickly.
Ok, since this was initially modded OT (but seems to be moving up), I'll explain my reasoning:
The story is about a news site that has pulled an article that might embarrass the current president, so I provide links to "alternative" "left-wing" news sites that often have their own copy of the story because they've already posted it, or they have an editorial about the article in question. I remember this Bush Sr. article being fairly heavily discussed when it was first noticed well before the war started. If you look at the histories of some of those sites, you'll find it.
And while I'm at it, I forgot two of the most relevant:
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (more serious)
Take Back the Media (more rabid)
How long before Google bow to the inevitable and start to exert editorial control over what is cached?
2-4 years, I expect.
Thankfully the Internet Archive is there and also has several instances of the lost page.
In fact, it does a significantly better job of this than Google does.
A robust Internet memory would require three or four such archives under different political control (the Way Back machine itself depends on the Smithsonian and thus possibly on funds coming from the US government.)
I'd like to see net archives made by the British Library, by the Library of Congress, by the UN, by the EU, etc.
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Is that archive.org will remove pages from the index if you ask, and will dutifully respect robots.txt files.
If robots.txts are carefully used, a file can be kept out of archive.org and robots.txt forever.
And it isn't really like archive.org, if it saw these as a problem, could ignore robots.txt files, since the most common reason for robots.txt is to keep a crawler from falling into a CGI script containing something that, from a crawler standpoint, is a bottomless pit of randomly generated links to itself.
How about "well-meaning man who picked a bad mentor, and thus has found himself led down a bad path with no clear escape route". I don't believe that our leadership is evil, I just think that they've attempted some extremely radical ideas in an attempt to make the world a better place, and it turns out they weren't successful. I hope that they are eventually successful, but so far all we have is failure and lies about the failure. And please stop referring to anybody who isn't lockstep with this administration as "you people", it's divisive, pointless and hinders success.
If, like me, you have a two-way tinfoil hat and hesitated to believe Memory Hole without proof, have a look at this PDF. It's a "teacher-aid" document from the Times (some sort of coursework on actuality based on Times article), and it mentions the "disappearing article".
Not only is the Times playing at Big Brother, they are not even competent when doing this... A simple Google search restricted to the times website found that in 2 sec.
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I recall that this very "problem" is one Clifford Stoll expected all those years ago when he wrote "Silicon Snake Oil".
The ability to revise history on the 'Net is far too easy since there are so few copies of any particular piece of content... and, despite the ability to make copies, the ability to distribute them relies on an infrastructure that cannot always be trusted.
So now history may be revised. What happens when we have no foundation to build upon?
(Wondering whether Lysenko's biology better fits the 'Net than it did... biology.)
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/bush-911.htm
Look at this page, and as you are looking, reflect upon it, asking yourself if any other leader of any other country at any point in history would have reacted even remotely similarly.
If this doesn't convince you that The Idiot isn't in charge of the country - or worse, that the 9-11 attack was expected, which is the obvious conclusion from the hundreds of reports from the CIA, FBI and other intelligence reports from around the world which were wilfully ignored - then I'm not sure what will.
You're right. Corporations can't do what governments can do.
They can't put you in jail -- directly. They can command government leverage to do that. Think Elcomsoft. Think RIAA. Think Scientology. They can jail you anytime they want by picking up a phone and getting their legal staff on the job. It's up to you to raise millions to defend yourself.
Corporations can't die. They can come after you for all eternity. Governments can be unelected.
Corporations are just collections of men, with their own agendas, but they pretend to be faceless artificial people who are therefore untouchable.
You can't pick and choose news corporations to find the best news for you. IF THEY ARE ALTERING THE HISTORICAL RECORD, HOW WOULD YOU EVER KNOW??? Informed consent is necessary to make a decision in a free market.
Corporations can collude in secret to remove articles that a partisan mindset shared among managers deems unsuitable. Governments cannot, at least not until this administration, hide what they do for very long.
People do pick and choose governments with ease, every four years. Try firing Microsoft.
Corporations, though "persons" with constitutional rights, have absolutely no personal accountability whatsoever for their actions. Want to talk to Time Warner about erasing the record? What is "Time"? Can you schedule an appointment with it? Make it do jail time?
Corporations now are the government. What do you call that form of government, komrade? "Police state" is a question begging term. Who owns the cops? Apparently the Secret Service has been ordering all the local law enforcement around the country to round up protesters in the President's path and detain them. Who owns the cops? Skylarov was yanked by cops on the sayso of Adobe; who owned the cops? Kevin Mitnick spent years in prison without charges because the corporations he insulted wanted him to rot, period. They seem to own the courts, don't they? The RIAA now can issue its own subpoenas and ruin people financially without ever talking to a court or the cops.
When the corporation becomes the law, you have a real police state. All the trappings of a democracy run by immortal, untouchable god-kings, who do whatever they like to whomever they like.
If you think that the media is just another block of corporations, you're missing an incredibly important aspect of our freedom. Having the corner on, say, toasters, is not the same thing as owning every newspaper in town (common in my country, Canada), and tv stations besides. The ability to stifle critical dissent becomes a real possibility, and -- if you read Noam Chomsky you'll understand the extent this applies to America (and I'm sure Canada, too) the ability to shape and mold the issues themselves.
Example. American high school teacher that I know through a friend asks her class immediately before the invasion -- Gulf War II -- how many of them feel fairly certain that Saddam has nuclear capability. Most of the class did. Nuclear. Now, we know that Saddam didn't have nukes. Biological or chemical maybe, maybe. But nuclear, no way. That program was destroyed years ago and there was no evidence to the contrary. How easy is it to do what you want in a democracy if your citizens are kept ill-informed?
As for the government being the corporations, it's not unheard of in alien lands (like Canada) to have government-owned corporations, to protect interests that can't be trusted to those who see money as the bottom line. Let's face it: an executive can run a business like a sinking ship if that golden parachute is waiting, and we simply cannot afford , as a country, for that to happen to health care, our police, our prisons, and our utilities (though that last is being tinkered with). Some things are a public trust, and what is wrong with running them as a service (to break even) than for a profit? Now for obvious reasons that couldn't be the case with the media -- but that again shows why it is, and has to be, a class apart.
Let me point out what is really wrong with this Time magazine history-rewrite. They deleted the article from the table of contents. It's the difference between walking out of a store with an unpaid-for good in your hands, obviously forgetful and in a rush, and having that same article stuffed into your bag. That is Orwellian.
In a "free market economy," truth, like everything else, is a commodity. Now, would you like to super-size your truth today?
It goes to show the immense influence government agents have over mainstream media. The biggest lie of this decade is that the media is liberal. In the televised news world, CNN is also known to be heavily influenced by government agents, and Fox News is a lost cause.
The Memory Hole should be rewarded for their vigilance against lies from mainstream media. Sadly, most people think that mainstream media will protect them from government abuse by reporting on those abuses. Yet, Time has proven that as a corporate animal it is obviously too immature to ensure its own good conduct. What we need is a news organization that operates on democratic, not strictly capitalistic principles. Raw capitalism is fine for most organizations. But, news, worthy news, is not one of them. A democratic organization must be behind the news broadcast or print, not a bottom-line oriented organization. Think of Ben Franklin as the person who started a newspaper for the cause of man, not the image of Ben on that greenback which has the ability to alter the truth so readily.
Get your democratic news here and here.
= 9J =
> Oh, yeah...the liberal media "Myth". Right. The only reason you think it's a "myth" is that you agree with the editorializing they pass off as "news".
Nope. The reason I know that most of the US media is conservative is that I don't agree with the editorializing they pass off as "news".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is why we still need real libraries with hard copy in them. Thousands of them, scattered across the country, with dedicated staff in them. The quality of a civilation can be judged by its libraries. One copy on a MASTER ARCHIVE can be changed and history is GMF. I do not want my world Gone Mother Fucker.
If I have no idea that there is information available on a particular subject, I'm less likely to ask for it. Even if I *do* ask for it, it's the fact that (today) I cane instantly share this information with a few billion people that makes it dangerous. That kind of distribution would have been impossible 20 years ago without a substantial cash outlay.
Knowing that the current administration is hiding things means that you are aware of some things that apparently need to be hidden by someone, not that it is any worse (or better) than the situation has been in the past. THAT is my argument. Our peripheral vision has increased to the point that we can make pretty good guesses about things that 2 decades ago would have been considered crackpot theories.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
If you don't believe him, look it up yourself. Everything he said is easily documented using google or any other search engine. I'm not going to bother because I remember reading about every single one of those points in the mainstream press when it happened. You would, too, if you'd stop listening to talk radio for five minutes and paid attention to the world around you.
If you need proof of George Ws cocaine bust, it is mentioned here . The story was confirmed by 3 sources close to the Bush family and has YET TO BE REFUTED. Naturally, such an allegation would be considered slander... but no one has yet to be sued for it. Instead, in one instance, they discredited the author by pointing out he had previously been convicted, not that the story was UNTRUE, but just that he had been convicted. And severe pressure from the Whitehouse was placed on the publisher to pull the book.
Hatfield said it was 3 sources close to Dubya and when pressed, he named Karl Rove.
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