The Cosmonaut is fine, next question.
Dana Milbank has article in todays paper
White House Web Scrubbing (washingtonpost.com) which is worth reading carfully and thinking about. It follows on to the Safire op-ed /US news article post I put up yesterday. I would take only one exception from Milbanks implicit framing for this piece - that this sort of behavior is still one step up from soviet style air-brushing . That is precisely it, it isn't. The first I remember encountering Soviet data minding was reading a magazine in high school. Article was on space programs, they had wanted a group picture of cosmonauts, their pull from the morgue file or Bettmann turned up one set of pictures which clearly was the same picture except one guy in the back row wasn't there any more and the wall behind him had been painted in. The magazine made a sidebar and printed both versions. The impulse behind the air-brushing hadn't been state security, but simply to avoid embarressment - the missing cosmonaut had died in an accident - accidents happen. It was done to maintain the illusion that everything is going according to plan, no one has guessed wrong (or 'guessed" at all) no one has done wrong, or made a mistake. That everything is exactly as it should be, and how it was predicted. All Is Under Control.
The Bush Administration has fussed with the web before, they're known to have put a robots.txt line in folders on their servers. I'm not sure i have this right - I am not a techie (IANATi) - this is a line of script that tells web crawlers not to look into, or index a folder. I seem to recall threads in Metafilter and Slashdot chewing on this and implied that content was changing behind this screen. I will use a break at work today where I have broadband, to try to dig those threads up.
Last thing I want to say about this is that I used to know this Andrew Natsios, He lived in the same town I grew up in, and used to teach in the schools (social studies). I always respected him. He's had a intense and varied career. Being in ths administration isn't making him a better man. At the end of the main war, he put out a statement saying that contract from the USIA would be assigned by merit and not just be handed over to Halliburton, though that is not what happended. Shortly after I read some articles which said that he put out a message to NGO's Bush wants Complicity of Aid Workers (Klein, Guardian, 23 June 03)
Reuters- NGO's Feel Squeeze
saying if you take a dime of the us Governments money or want to, you better fall in with the Party line.
Addendum Fri 19 Dec 03. 2050 EST: The Slashdot thread I alluded to is
White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling. The Metafilter thread is based on the original Slashdot post.
I also ought to point out NGO stands for Non Governmental Organization to the extent that national governments give money to NGO's as part of foreign aid programs they indicate by doing so that the NGOs add value (often the essential and sufficient part) by being non governmental that they can not replicate, otherwise they could and would do it directly. Mr. Natsios is insisting the question be asked: What Part of Non Governmental is it that you don't understand?
11:50:42 PM  ;;
|
|
