Slashdot Mirror
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."
Archive.org, Google Cache, etc. all help.
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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How can we keep corporate America honest?
Wish as hard as you can. Maybe click your heels three times, for luck.
-kgj
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.
Excerpt from "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" by George Bush Sr. and Brent Scowcroft, Time (2 March 1998):
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasio route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
Once you've published something on the internet, it's very hard to remove it. There are too many 'bots beavering away in the background. If I do a search for my name on google, I get info going all the way back to my post-grad days at college some 12 years ago....
The only real way to get rid of something is to pull it quickly.. leave it around and you've no chance......
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Since its becoming slashdotted, here is the cache
Maybe if you tought some of the millions of mindless drones clicking "I feel lucky" on google and taking everything they read as god breathed. In schools they need to be teaching kids to look at the source of their information closely, and in the workplace instead of teaching employees route memorization of "click here to check e-mail, click here to delete a message, click here to close e-mail...etc" teach them some basic computing principles, including conducting research on the internet.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
> 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 wasn't omitted. It was excised. It was there, and now it isn't, but all the rest of the contents of that issue still are.
Virg
They dont 'have to keep honest'. There is no law that says they have to keep a story in place forever..
Its their resources they use to do so... when they are finished with the story they can dump it..
As long as what they report is the truth ( or with a disclaimer that its opinion and not fact ) then they are within their rights to do what ever they want with THEIR data...
Now when the government does this, thats a different issue...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just go here:
CommonDreams
CounterPunch
Bad News: Noam Chomksy Archive
AlterNet
Or read a book.
Any good and honest right-wing folk (if you want to set up such a arbitrary left/right binary) should reply with their favorite truth-speaking resources.
Looks like somebody want's to remove the evidence that will make somebody look stupid. Maybe Bush should have talked to his daddy before invading Iraq
Straight answer: You can't. If a corporation has financial reason to do something, they will, period. No "morality" or "social conscience" or "concern for human freedom" will play into it. That's the way corporations work; committees and boards of trustees don't have any kind of hive-morality, only a concern for their company's bottom line.
If media corporations and content-providing conglomerates have a financial or political reason to alter their records, they will, and they have no legal reason to do otherwise. We can only hope that the open-standard-based free internet can survive and let us remember electronically.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
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.
The reason behind it doesn't matter. It's the act of doing it which draws our ire. Alteration through deletion is still alteration. Read 1984 and pay attention to how the government changes the memory of the people through media. Don't let things like this be the thin-end of a wedge.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I think it's time to remember that the Internet is not a Parent nor is it a Governing Body. It is just a collection of writing. So you shouldn't come to it expecting truth or fairness. It just isn't that way.
You want to keep Corporate America honest? Two ways: government mandate and journalism. That's the way its always been done, always will be. By keeping the population informed (ideally) corporations and officials will have to be wellbehaved.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Things will sort themselves out if the internet reamains a free place where anyone can get on as a peer and publish. New publications will replace the old ones that act like Time. If the internet becomes more like broadcast TV, where only $pecial people with credentials can publish, it won't be trusted and the information superhighway will be just another billboard.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Wayback Machine
--
If you go to the TIMES table of contents thats posted on the "Memory Hole" page, you will see why the article is not online. Since it deals with a popular subject, TIMES moved it to their paid content... so the free version is no longer available. Go HERE and read the top line. In short, I doubt its a conspiracy, TIMES is just being greedy and wants more money. Which as a company is its right.
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
You're not addressing the key point.
Whether or not the current action was a good idea is a very valid current topic.
National publications censoring their own previous publications in an apparent attempt NOT to embarrass the current president regarding this issue is definitely News, and Stuff that Matters.
It's the removal that makes it interesting - in a sense, THEY BROUGHT UP THE ISSUE FIRST
What follows is a copy of his resignation speech in the House of Commons, which won applause from some backbenchers in unprecedented Commons scenes.
As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem
I don't think what Time does on their site has any real bearing on what most reporters and researchers will find. This is because most of them use lexis nexis. It is my understanding that lexis nexis will keep a copy of the article (I'm not sure, it costs money to use). Even if it doesn't, it will keep references to it. It will be shown to exist.
What would cause for concern is lexis nexis removing stuff.
i don't like my old sig.
Instructions are here.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
How can we keep corporate America honest?"
Bush or Time magazine?
Photos.
No, definitely not a troll.
There is an excellent article in the Economist about this, unfortunately for subscribers only. Here is a pertinent quote:
A case in point is the near-total secrecy in which the Department of Homeland Security was hatched. No cabinet secretary was consulted. Nor were most senior advisers. The largest government reorganisation in half a century, involving huge numbers of civil servants and tricky questions of government relations, was decided upon by a handful of people (originally four, with aides) and without serious consultation with Congress. Did that improve the quality of decisions?
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Speech: U.S. Senator
U.S. SENATOR PATRICK LEAHY
...by content providers, perhaps more easily than things they published on the internet or on paper.
I worked for a company that provided large quantities of content to Lexis-Nexis for six years. They provide a method by which content can be removed by anyone who is providing it.
And my experience dealing with Lexis-Nexis as a company did not leave me with a good feeling about their concern for an accurate record.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
The "Liberal Media" is a myth. It used to be like that, but over the last 10 years the bulk of the media in the US, and in fact many countries has ended up in the hands of a small group of very wealthy men.
It should not be surprising that these men have a rather more conservative point of view than the press owners who they bought out.
By and large, today's media speaks for the establishment, and in the US the establishment is a Republican one.
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How's that for twisted? The default search is "Articles since 1985". :)
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Why is it important for this to be posted on
There's absolutely no geek factor here anywhere!
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
Corporate America is always honest!
I keep trying to post this comment, but everytime I hit "Submit", I get an ad for Belkin's Parental Notification.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Perhaps they pulled it to spark conversations like this one? That is, to make it look like the mean old government censored them. It's not the craziest idea I've ever heard.
Or maybe the author asked them to pull it?
I wonder if anyone will bother to find out the truth, or if everyone will just assume Bush is guilty.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Not true.
The table of contents still lists all the other articles - if you click on any one of them (for example this one you get the first paragraph, and then an invitation to buy the rest of the article. Fine, that's their right - it costs money to archive so many pages...
But the article is question isn't listed - and the link given by The Memory Hole doesn't offer to sell you the article, it says it has been deleted.
And it's nothing to do with it being a 'popular subject' - Time states quite clearly that it's only issues over 2 years old that are archived, not 'historically important' ones.
Mark
Liked this comment? Why not buy me something nice
What could Clinton do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
What will Bush do to decisively stop North Korea's nuclear program? Nothing, since they have thousands of howitzers in caves within range of South Korea's capital which could decimate it in a couple of minutes.
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.
What do you know about World Politic? Find out in this quiz
Clearly this article was ++ungood, and needed to be edited by one of the historians at the Ministry of Truth...err, Department of Homeland Security. I'm sure that this article will re-appear shortly in it's correct form, proving George Bush Sr. desperately wanted to invade Iraq and capture Sadaam during the first Gulf War, but was thwarted by the evil schemings of Eastasia...err, the Liberals.
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
Considering the original was written pre 9/11, my guess would be that the author no longer feels that way. This has nothing to do with keeping corporate America honest. This has to do with keeping a web site relavent and up to date. No one is trying to HIDE what he said, and it is print and freely available all over the place (google is your friend)
The world changes, no one expects us to follow the policies as laid out in the cold war toward the Soviet Union. With that in mind, I believe it is only the painfully naive that would suggest that we treat the world the same way we did pre 9/11.
I think the 300,000+ bodies in mass graves, and the payments to suicide bombers post Gulf War I show us that Bush Sr. was mistaken.
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Let's edit:
"Apparently there were people near the top who know what they were doing,"
Take a good long look at the neocon "think tanks" from which our current foreign policy took its core. They regard the position George H.W. Bush took toward Iraq as a sign of weakness; they explicitly pushed for a unilateralist, aggressive foreign policy in the Middle East so as to re-shape that part of the world, well before 9/11.
The concerns the senior Bush shows in this article simply irritate(d) the high-ups in our current administration. The multilateral model, the concern about becoming de facto rulers of Iraq -- all that just bespeaks an America too wussy to step up to the plate, in the view of people like Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They sent at least one letter to Clinton laying out this basic policy during the 90's.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Was this kind of like the briefings Clinton gave to GWB during transition, about how he had to keep his eye on Al Quaeda, and how that one issue would chew up more of his time than he would ever imagine?
That was before US State policy turned away from the Middle East and began focusing on ballistic missile defense.
Which was before US State policy got forcibly re-focused on the Middle East
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"The messages [Winston] had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify.... As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs -- to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record."
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.
An archive search for the title produces no hits.
Write letters to the editor. Contact a local or national news outlet. Contact a competitor to Time. Get the news out of slashdot and into the public.
Editor of Time.com - daily@timeinc.net
Editor of Time - letters@time.com
It's not Slashdot vs Bush... it's common decency and civil liberties vs Bush. Have you ever read George Orwell's 1984?
I remember a time when Reagan preached against the 'commies' because they spied on their neighbors and because the people had no freedoms. Now the same thing is happening in our backyard and you expect us not to say anything about it? Some cokehead who went AWOL is running our government and getting our young men and women killed so that we can have more oil to power our SUV's and you think this is a good thing?
Hell, even daddy Bush disagrees with you it seems.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
The biggest spending budgets have been Bush Jr, Bush Sr. and Reagan - Clinton's budgets were smaller, if you subtract the entitlements inserted into each by everybody's predecessors. Of them all, only Clinton balanced the budget into a vast surplus, partly by winding down the profligate military budget, without disrupting the economy or political stability. Each of those Republican presidents vastly increased the budget, the deficit, the debt, and the size of government, and each has started a recession/depression in their first couple of years. By subsidizing corporations, the military, and the uppermost class crossover of the two, at the expense of the public. More accurate:
Liberal: spends public money on the public, people
Conservative: spends public money on private corporations
--
make install -not war
Geeze...I'm sure there are quite a few copies of that magazine and article in paper form or micro-whatever. Geeze...
I mean, you shouldn't be using one source for your research anyway. Especially the internet!
Blar.
In a "free market economy," truth, like everything else, is a commodity. Now, would you like to super-size your truth today?
It shows that the situation in Iraq was understood 3 years before 9/11.
It shows that the situation in Iraq was understood back in 1990.
So why did Bush think that the situation would be different now?
Ad a bit of food for thought, here is a relevant selection from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which coined the term 'memory hole':
But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -- if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, `doublethink'.
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 =
Sure wish i knew mexican :T
"Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" is Latin for "Who Watches The Watchers?".
I'd like to say I could've translated that. However, I still get some geek karma for it: I recognized it from having seen it before on the Star Trek TNG episode named, appropriately, "Who Watches The Watchers".
[
The US government is at it as wel....
t m
http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/draft-boards.h
--------
On 23 Sept 2003, the Defense Department Website called "Defend America" posted a notice for people to join local draft boards. "If a military draft becomes necessary," the notice explained, "approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men, who submit a claim, receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service, based on Federal guidelines."
In early November, that notice started to receive media attention, with articles from the Associated Press, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer , the Oregonian, the Toronto Star, the BBC, and London Guardian (unsurprisingly, none of the major papers or networks in the US covered it).
In a familiar turn of events, the notice suddenly disappeared from the Website. (Thanks to LG for pointing this out.) We've mirrored the page and posted the text below.
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Time, a 'liberal' news outlet, pulled without announcement from their archive something critical of the Bush administration, at the expense of the public's perception of their journalistic integrity, on the hope somebody would stumble across its absence and post on a Slashdot-type forum and generate publicity for Time's..hmmmmm, lack of integrity? The discussion has come full circle, please pass a Tin Foil Hat.
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 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.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.