Discourse.net

Whitehouse.gov Seeks to Put Iraq Statements Down the Memory Hole

I had a small cascade of reactions to this (via Eschaton).

First thought: It’s disgusting that the White House is trying to relegate its statements about Iraq to the Memory Hole.

Second thought: It’s great to live in a free country where this doesn’t work.

Third thought: This demonstrates the same level of technical (in)competence we see in so many things this Administration does.

Fourth thought: Maybe it does work more often than not — many people have come to rely on Google. Efforts like this often won’t get spotted most of the time.

Fifith set of thoughts: How do we prevent, or at least identify and publicize and warn about, this sort of activity in the future? Will this mean that commercial databases which keep pristine copies of things and promise not to santize still have a place? Can something like archive.org overcome this sort of attack on our online history? Is there anything Congress could or should do about this? (Needen’t ask “would”—we know the answer to that.)

Update: Sixth thought: Well, they just made it much less accessible (although people who rely on google might get the idea the statements didn’t exist), as far as we know they didn’t actually delete them. It could be worse. But it’s also more deniable.

Seventh thought: If I ran Google, would I now instruct my spiders to ignore the robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov?

Linking as Civil Disobedience

Lawmeme asks How Direct is Too Direct When It Comes to Hyperlinks?

Let’s see. Can’t host the files. Can’t link to the files. Can’t link to a site with the files. Where will the madness end? This is the Internet. Hyperlinking doesn’t supply easy dividing lines, and when you start telling people what they can and can’t link, you start murderizing the Web.

Then they give links to

• a site with the memos
• a site that links to a site with the memos.
• a site that links to a site that links to a site with the memos.
• a site that links to a site that links to a site that links to a site with the memos.

Then, there’s the kicker:

Here’s a link to a site that links to a site that links to a site that links to a site that links to a site with the memos. Whoops, that’s the Diebold home page.

My own personal view is that a hyperlink is and should be every bit as illegal as a footnote in an academic article.

What Does The FT's Computer Know That We Don't?

So, I’m reading the Financial Times’s account of how the CIA is telling the Senate that Naming of agent ‘was aimed at discrediting CIA’ and idly wondering if it’s a bad thing or a terrible thing when a banana republic’s Great Power’s clandestine services get into a war with the Junta Chief Executive, when I notice that the FT’s computer has a couple of stories that it has identifed as related to the Bush administration’s unprecedented betrayal of a clandestine CIA operative.

Click the thumbnail to see the apt headlines to the two links