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."

Comments

"Keep" them honest?

[heironymouscoward]

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.

Re:"Keep" them honest?

[Zocalo]

Interesting that you should bring up Stalin, another big fan of revising the "official" records to expunge subjects and persons out of favour from the official records. Stalin's first efforts of media control were in the printed media too, but editing of photographs and the other media followed fairly quickly.

I don't think Stalin went so far as to edit his own family though...

Re:"Keep" them honest?

[mdmarkus]

The photograph you mention is an interesting example of the propoganda we promulgated during the Cold War. It's presented as someone doctoring a photograph of Stalin making a speech; in the undoctored version, someone (Trotsky, i think) is standing next to Stalin, and in the doctored version, he's gone. In the examples i've seen of it (the last one i remember was in a relatively recent copy of USNews), they were actually 2 separate undoctored pictures (other people were in different positions). While it's an example of Stalin manipulating his message, it's also an example of the US manipulating their message.

Why is this any different?

[Pointy_Hair]

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.

It's like the old joke...

[sirgoran]

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

Silent protest

[infolib]

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...)

Re:Worried about memory holes?

[useosx]

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)

Also John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation

[NZheretic]

Letters of resignation, particularly those from State Department diplomats to their superiors, are not ordinarily a forum for disagreements about the course of American foreign policy. The following letter of resignation, written by career diplomat John Brady Kiesling to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, is unusual for its content and length. Kiesling, 45, served in several U.S. embassies before his most recent post in Athens. He shared a 1994 award from the American Foreign Service Association for "constructive dissent" after he and 12 others signed a letter of protest over the lack of U.S. intervention in the conflict in Bosnia.

February 27, 2003

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safegua! rds that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little

Re:easy

[heironymouscoward]

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.

The problem wijth this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Proof the article existed

[Kinniken]

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.

The Idiot chills out for five minutes

[Threni]

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.

Re:Archive.org

[Catbeller]

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.

Re:Archive.org

[dandelion_wine]

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.