IP: The Web Never Forgets

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
> To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>
>
> The Web Never Forgets
>
> Government agencies have tried to remove sensitive information, only to
> discover that copies have proliferated and they're virtually impossible to
> eradicate.
> By DAVID COLKER, LA TIMES STAFF WRITER
>
> Within days of the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances
> and Disease Registry rushed to pull a suddenly sensitive report from its Web
> site titled "Industrial Chemicals and Terrorism." The agency eliminated all
> traces of the document and its description of sources for home-brew nerve
> gases and improvised explosives.
>
> But on the World Wide Web, almost nothing truly dies.
>
> Indeed, the thorny report currently lives on at several locations, including
> the site for the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the
> Prevention of Terrorism, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student's Web site and the
> databanks of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit venture that has
> electronically stored an estimated 10 billion Web pages in an effort to
> preserve the Web's history. The Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is one
> of several agencies--public and private--facing this problem. Contrary to
> concerns about too much censorship in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist
> attacks, the reality is that some agencies are having a hard time censoring
> anything that was once published on the Internet.
>
> --SNIP--
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000094419nov27.story
>
> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
> geoff.goodfellow () iconia com, Prague CZ * tel/mobil +420 (0)603 706 558
> "success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get"
> http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html


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