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WH censoring its website?
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 19:16:21 -0500
Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:02:35 -0500 From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org> Subject: WH censoring its website? To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001450.shtml If so, it conspiracy theories abound...... Rick -infowarrior.org<http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001450.shtml#001450>White House Website and History
posted by <mailto:dgillmor () sjmercury com>Dan Gillmor 09:17 AM <http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001450.shtml#001450>permanent link to this item
Democratic National Committee Blog: <http://www.democrats.org/blog/display/00010130.html>Enabling historical revisionism. Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with "Iraq" in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them.
Perhaps the White House doesn't want to make it easy for people to compare its older statements about Iraq with current realities -- though that doesn't explain why the pages are searchable on the White House site itself. Maybe, then, the White House wants to know who's looking for these things (e.g. by tracking IP addresses of people who query the government site).
Either way, the blocking of search engines is a bad idea, and fundamentally an abuse of the public trust.
What should be done about this? I'd suggest a manual-labor cooperative, of people willing to download the daily feed from the White House, mirror it and ensure that people can search without having their IP addresses logged. If you have a better idea, post a comment.
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- WH censoring its website? Dave Farber (Oct 27)