WH censoring its website?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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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