Don't worry your pretty little head about it.
April 28, 2004 10:12 AM   Subscribe

White House "disappears" women's info. The Bush administration has quietly removed 25 reports from its Women's Bureau Web site, deleting or distorting crucial information on issues from pay equity to reproductive healthcare. There's a long article about it over at Salon, behind the premium wall.
posted by dejah420 (16 comments total)
 
OK, lazyweb...how hard would it be to create a nightly crawl of every government page, save it, and have the page checked against the last night's page for differences? Sort of an archive.gov for the masses. I suspect not hard, but the real problem would be storage and creating an useful interface to navigate the changes. That, and how to adjudicate what is a distortion or a legitimate deletion.
posted by plemeljr at 10:23 AM on April 28, 2004


Oppression begins and ends with data.
posted by ewkpates at 10:42 AM on April 28, 2004


**insert obligatory 1984 quote here**
posted by fatbobsmith at 11:14 AM on April 28, 2004


honestly, who would expect better of the bush administration?
posted by muppetboy at 11:21 AM on April 28, 2004


**insert obligatory Animal Farm quote here**
posted by Joey Michaels at 11:21 AM on April 28, 2004


**insert obligatory Dude Where's my Car quote here**
posted by oissubke at 11:37 AM on April 28, 2004


"the real problem would be storage and creating an useful interface to navigate the changes. That, and how to adjudicate what is a distortion or a legitimate deletion."

My first thought was, "storage shouldn't be a problem, since you'd only capture delta."

But then I remembered how many damn gov't sites that there are....

Interesting idea, though...
posted by lodurr at 11:42 AM on April 28, 2004


Thanks for posting this; I hadn't seen any news on the release of the report (sadly enough).

Couldn't believe the part about wanting to have "upbeat" stories for news agencies, such as that the pay equity gap is the smallest it's ever been. Optimism is all well and good there's still this thing called reality, and given that people can be swayed by headlines, false hope stories are worrisome.
posted by livii at 12:10 PM on April 28, 2004


Actually, it would take a long while.

About 3 months ago, I attempted a wget of whitehouse.gov. I don't recall the specifics now, but I put it at a friendly retrieval rate so it wouldn't look like a DDOS attempt, eliminated requests for pictures, and let it roll its merry way.

1 week and 40 GB later, it still wasn't finished. I had tons of PDF files, and Ghu knows how many html documents. I did a quick check of the files using MD5 checksums, and there weren't any duplicates.

So, to answer plemeljr's question, I don't think it'd be very hard, but it'd require a decent amount of bandwidth and storage to make it happen.
posted by jakestone at 12:13 PM on April 28, 2004


* insert Winger lyrics *
posted by xmutex at 12:16 PM on April 28, 2004


Why am I not surprised in the least by this? The regime that lies more often than it tells the truth.

plemeljr has a good idea, just a question of who's got the time and the money to make it happen.

And livii, reality and ShrubCo have only met briefly while passing in the hallways once.
posted by fenriq at 12:22 PM on April 28, 2004


fenriq, you really think El Chimpo & reality are even in the same zip code these days?
posted by chicobangs at 12:48 PM on April 28, 2004


Oppression begins and ends with data.

Speaking of data manipulation, I didn't want to clog the front page with more Iraq stuff, but a librarian just emailed me The Case of the Disappearing Article, from two weeks ago, about how Time magazine last year 'lost' a 1998 article that was on their web site, in which George Bush I listed reasons why invading Iraq would be a bad idea.

The article also mentions The Memory Hole, which tries to keep track of things like this, and which we've discussed a number of times.
posted by LeLiLo at 1:08 PM on April 28, 2004


"OK ladies. Back to the kitchen!........

The boys'll take care of business from now on. "

posted by troutfishing at 2:21 PM on April 28, 2004


* insert The State quote. again! *
posted by memnock at 8:49 PM on April 28, 2004


* insert obligatory The Handmaid's Tale quote here *

or, you know, not.
posted by reklaw at 12:25 PM on April 29, 2004


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