Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

The most disturbing news story I've read all year

(1/5) > >>

40hz:
In Orwell's dystopian 1984, Inner Party aparatchik O'Brien makes the now famous comment: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” in reference to the Ministry of Truth's constant reediting of records and news stories to "correct errors" and bring history "into alignment" with the present official truth.



Apparently, the practice has escaped the pages of fiction and has started making its way into the real world according to this story posted on Techdirt.


UK Political Party Tries To Dump 10 Years Of Speeches Down The Memory Hole
from the because-that-ALWAYS-works...-ALWAYS dept

Every so often a public figure will come to the dubious conclusion that the past can be erased. This was a difficult proposition even before the advent of the internet. These days, it's nearly impossible. But long odds rarely deter the particularly inspired… or particularly stupid.

Some abuse the easily-abusable laws in European countries to generate memory holes. Max Mosely has been fruitlessly pursuing the removal of so-called "not actually a Nazi orgy" photos for years. Others simply blunder around, issuing baseless legal threats and questionable DMCA notices. Others, like the UK Conservative Party, do their own dirty work.

Being willing to wipe your own collective memory takes a special kind of bravery, the kind often associated with reckless acts shortly preceded by the phrase, "Hold my beer."

pixelpusher220 was the first to send in the ComputerWeekly story which details the efforts the UK's Conservative Party recently made to eradicate an entire decade's worth of speeches from the internet.

    The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.

    Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.

    But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.
--- End quote ---

--- End quote ---

All fine and dandy you may think. We still have The Internet Archives don't we? Nothing can ever be truly erased from the web as long as the IA saw it first, right?

Well...according to the article, the answer appears to be: Don't be so sure.

The Conservative Party did more than simply delete the speeches from its site. It also blocked out Google and the Internet Archive using an extensive addition to its robots.txt.
.
.
.
So, how did it get the Internet Archive to remove its historical collection, something ComputerWeekly writer Mark Ballard likens to "sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park?"

Well, apparently the Internet Archive treats changes to robots.txt files as retroactively applicable. Once the bot blocker informed IA it was no longer welcome to crawl these pages, it erased the corresponding archives as a "matter of courtesy."

By making this change, the Conservative Party was able to eliminate 1,158 "snapshots" the Archive had gathered over the last 14 years, a rather breathtaking eradication accomplished without ever having to strong arm internet historians or stare down Google directly.

The Conservative Party has offered no comment on the slash-and-burn of its own history, simply saying it has passed along the query to its "website guy."  <more>
--- End quote ---

A very disturbing story...and harbinger of things to come once this bit of info makes its way into government circles. Especially those governments which claim to be most in support of "transparency." :'(

dr_andus:
Look on the bright side. At least they are no longer polluting anybody's mind with all that nonsense  ;)

dr_andus:
But more seriously, isn't this just calling for a Streisand effect? As it turns out, there is always a copy of it somewhere, and this sort of behaviour will just make historians, activists etc. be more mindful with their archiving, and new tools will be developed to prevent governments to get away with this sort of thing.

I bet they already regret that they've done this...

TaoPhoenix:
Naw, posted without reading the thread (sorry!), the whole 1984 theme is So Past Due ... that we have to go to the more extreme SF works to find our Salvation.

I don't know what they are. Only that I won't be here in seven years time so use me well while you got me!

barney:
the whole 1984 theme is So Past Due ...
-TaoPhoenix (November 14, 2013, 10:33 PM)
--- End quote ---

I wanna live in your reality!  It's already here in mine.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page