I’ve not seen much mention of the fact that libertarian journalist extraordinaire Declan McCullough has joined the blogosphere. His most interesting post to date was this one, in which he revealed that the White House has been using its robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing or archiving potentially embarrassing information:
Whitehouse.gov was programmed to block search engines from indexing a photo gallery of President Bush in a flight suit standing in front of that famous Iraq “Mission Accomplished” banner in May 2003.
What’s odd is that the gallery, which has since been moved, was the only one on the entire Whitehouse.gov site listed as off-limits. To be fair, though, the current location is not off-limits.
By way of background, there was a flap in late 2003 about the White House using robots.txt to tell search engine bots to stay away from “/iraq” pages because the same file was posted in the main section and duplicated in the “/iraq” section. It’s the same logic as blocking text-only pages; here’s an example of the same text appearing in three different templates: normal, text-only, and printer-friendly. The White House seems to have subsequently discontinued the Iraq template.
That explains the “/nsc/iraq” directory being marked as off-limits to search engines. But out of 767 mentions of “/iraq” in the robots.txt file from 2003, the sole Iraq press release or gallery listed as blocked this week (a) represents a uniquely embarrassing moment for the Bush administration and (b) has been the subject of revisionism.
Don’t believe me? Bush’s carrier speech originally was titled, according to the Internet Archive, “President Bush Announces Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended” and featured photographs of smiling Iraqi children. At some point the children vanished and the speech was quietly renamed: “President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended.” Another USS Abraham Lincoln-related switch: before and after.
It looks like it’ll be a great blog!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.