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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
How can we keep corporate America honest?
Wish as hard as you can. Maybe click your heels three times, for luck.
-kgj
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
...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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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