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IP: The Web Never Forgets
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 07:11:23 -0500
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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- IP: The Web Never Forgets David Farber (Nov 28)