Web Scrubbing: Are We in 2007 or 1984?

New Matilda, 23 April 2007

By Kellie Tranter

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."

George Orwell's concept that governments could re-write history to secure political obedience was chilling to say the least. If reading "1984" caused disquiet one could always make a cup of tea, relax and be comforted by the thought that it was just a work of fiction. But is it? Unfortunately Orwell seems to have predicted the future with disturbing accuracy.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Governments harness modern technology to use the Internet as a vehicle for their propaganda, but its disadvantage is that the message is available in "concrete" written form and has the potential to make them accountable. The solution? Take advantage of the transience of electronic blips. And so we are now seeing the rise of a new phenomenon: Government “web scrubbing”. This recently coined phrase appropriately describes the regular manipulation, by selective removal and creative editing, of Government information on the Internet.

Americans have been aware of the problem for several years, but in Australia it doesn't seem to have registered yet. It should, because it is going on right now.

In December 2003, Washington Post Staff Reporter Dana Milbank reported that the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history. She reported that “White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said....that U.S. taxpayers would not have to pay more than $1.7 billion to reconstruct Iraq -- which turned out to be a gross understatement of the tens of billions of dollars the government now expects to spend.

The government later purged the offending comments by Natsios from the agency's Web site. The transcript, and links to it, vanished.

She also noted that “after the insurrection in Iraq proved more stubborn than expected, the White House edited the original headline on its Website of President Bush’s May 1 speech, "President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended,” to insert the word “Major” before combat.

She goes on to give further examples of “web scrubbing” occurring on Government administration Web sites for anything vaguely sensitive, with passwords now being required to access even much unclassified information.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9821-2003Dec17?language=printer
http://www.gcn.com/print/21_7/18308-1.html

A paper by Susan Nevelow Mart, a California Reference Librarian and Adjunct Professor of Law, “Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information Removed from the Internet Be Reclaimed?” also describes instances of information disappearing from government agency websites at an alarming pace, generally in the name of national security: much of the information removed has little effect on national security, but its loss deleteriously affects vitally important public issues, such as local environmental contamination, women’s health and employment parity and civil rights issues.
http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=uch

Orwell forewarned us of the danger of precisely this scenario when he wrote:
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death." "And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

How can this be permitted to occur in a 21st century democracy with allegedly responsible and accountable government? A government that behaves in this way is abnegating responsibility and shirking accountability.

Notwithstanding that "Australian Values" apparently permeate the very being of all Australians, and ipso facto our elected representatives, there is clear evidence that “web scrubbing” is well entrenched in Australia. We must be alert for the removal of unclassified information from our Federal Government’s websites because, if the Federal government cannot or will not explain its editing practices, we should assume that the deleted material is considered sensitive or embarrassing.

After the June 2006 US Supreme Court ruling that the military commissions set up by the Bush Administration to try prisoners, including David Hicks, at Guantanamo Bay were illegal and must be abandoned, we saw the removal of David Hicks Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) from the Attorney General’s website > Fortunately the text from the FAQs was posted to the Fair Go For David Website and reveals the untenable stance taken by the Government at that time.
http://www.fairgofordavid.org/htmlfiles/documents/aghicksfaq.htm

And now the FAQs have returned to the Attorney General’s website! But look for yourself: the "compare and contrast" exercise is revealing! Go to FAQs >

Next, consider the ongoing debate about the allocation of GST revenue where the key is the word “review”. The link to the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Reform of Commonwealth-State Financial Relations has been removed from John Howard’s website.
http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Release/1999/intgovreformcsfinrelations.cfm

The States agreed to a GST under an agreement that required them to abolish a certain number of taxes by 2005. The States say they have complied with their obligations under the Agreement which also required them to “review” taxes. The Federal Government, and in particular Peter Costello, says “review” means “abolish”. Who is right? How can we tell if we can't access the actual agreement?

And a final, particularly timely, example. In 1997, just days before the Kyoto agreement, the Prime Minister announced a $180 million, 5 year package of measures under the heading Safeguarding the Future: Australia's response to climate change. He argued that this package of measures represented a `balanced and far sighted approach' to answer the challenge of climate change and that the package would deliver a `reduction of a third in our expected net emissions growth from 1990-2010… from 28 to 18 per cent in that period'. Howard's detailed 16 page statement was proudly published on his web site and was still accessible about six months ago.

With the climate change debate now galvanising popular opinion it would be most interesting to review Howard's statements from 10 years ago and see whether or not the reduction he promised his package would deliver is being achieved. Unfortunately, however, that speech has now been removed from Howard’s website:
www.pm.gov.au/news/media_releases/1997/GREEN.html even though it is referred to in other documents such as the Report of the Senate Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee "The Heat Is On: Australia's Greenhouse Future" >

Similar web scrubbing practices occur in the private sector. You will recall that in the course of the Cole Inquiry it became public knowledge that Tigris Petroleum and BHP formed a joint-venture partnership in Iraq and were working on two projects with the Iraqi Oil Ministry, BHP apparently having authorised Tigris to conduct all its relationships with Saddam Hussein's regime from September 2000 until the dictator's removal in 2003. Under the deal, BHP retained the right to participate in any projects captured by Tigris once sanctions against Iraq were lifted. Apparently a lot of information was available on Tigris's website, but before the AWB inquiry commenced it was reported that the company's website had been shut down.
http://www.tigrispetroleum.com/

Now, what one thinks of companies that engage in web scrubbing depends on one's views about corporate ethics and social responsibility, and in our modern free-market world it undoubtedly happens all the time and most people probably just don't care. As the economists and financial analysts say, corporations are responsible to their shareholders. But governments-- and particularly our Government -- engaging in that sort of conduct is a completely different thing. Our government is responsible to us -- all of us -- and in the Westminster system is supposed to be accountable to us. But instead of a government that is prepared to state its position, acknowledge that history and explain any later deviations from its original stance we seem to have a government that wishes to edit and possibly manipulate history with the object of creating an illusory veneer of consistency. "We have nothing to explain... we were right all along."

Howard's Government is proud to stand on its record, but how can we know what its record is without having access to comprehensive historical information that has not been tampered with? If the government erases from our recorded memory its statements spruiking strategies that haven't worked and goals that haven't been achieved, and discards into the bin of oblivion statements supporting obviously untenable institutions of our allies, how are we to assess our government's achievements and failures?

These questions are particularly significant with the Federal election coming up and with the increasing number of back flips that are being performed in Canberra. The instances of web scrubbing I have described must be a miniscule portion of the web scrubbing that has actually been carried out.

The way to deal with this seems quite simple, although I hesitate to suggest that any government will forego the power to tinker with its past. All we need is a central repository to record and store a permanent record of all government Web postings -- easily achievable with modern cheap, huge capacity data storage -- that is accessible over the Internet to all citizens. If any restriction of access is to apply to that historical record it should only be on the basis of a demonstrable threat to national security.

::BACK::