What the Bush Administration DOESN'T want you to know

It's News, Dammit uncovers strong evidence to support claims that the White House has suppressed the availability of important information on the Internet.Computer forensics experts working for Byzantine Communications have uncovered a large repository of information stored on the whitehouse.gov web server that the Bush administration doesn't want people to find. Due to Freedom of Information mandates, the governmental information must be publicly accessible, but the White House's IT staff has exploited a loophole in the law, making every effort to keep the public from finding out about this information.

The technical means through which the Bush Administration is suppressing the information is use of a robots file, which restricts the ability of search engine to catalog a web page. With the robot restrictions in place, for example, Google cannot "spider" those restricted web pages.

Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry has launched a radio and television ad assault on the current administration's information repression policy. Here is one short radio ad's text:

How is it that John Ashcroft can view your library and bookstore purchase records, but you can't find supposedly public information regarding the Iraq war or the Department of Homeland Security on www.whitehouse.gov? As your president, I will share all information with you. I'm John Kerry, and I approve of this message.

The Kerry campaign has also launched a massive web blitz, urging people to link to the list of repressed websites at this address: http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt. Through increased exposure, the campaign argues, Americans will learn just to what extend the Bush administration wants to hide information from the public.

White House officials argue that there is no conspiracy, no coverup of information. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan: "All of the information disallowed in the robots file is merely to conserve bandwidth by minimizing search engine traffic. Any citizen can go to whitehouse.gov and use the site map, or the site search functionality to find all of this information. It is available for public consumption, in accordance with all of the laws and regulations in place."

Members of the information technology community remain unimpressed with the web restrictions, as well as the reaction to it. "A robots.txt file cannot suppress information, and cannot be enforced by any technology. It's an 'on your honor' system. A rogue search engine could ignore the robots restrictions, cataloging each and every link on a website," says Martijn Koster, a respected expert on web search technology.

"Also, the Kerry campaign has greatly overblown this issue. Take a look at the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file. It's mostly just info of some historical or press-release nature. Does Google really need to give a high page rank to the 2004 state easter eggs, or tee ball pictures from 2003? If you think there's some hidden agenda going on, go search the robots.txt file yourself."

Girl still has hope for dog lost over Hoover Dam

"i hope this person didn't lose their dog, because that would just be sad."

Djibouti, Africa -- A girl here is still holding out hope that a dog lost over the Hoover Dam in Nevada may have been found.

Linking on her website to what appears to be a photograph from a family vacation photo album, her web page shows an image of a dog chasing a Frisbee over the edge of the Hoover Dam, with a man, presumably his owner, watching in horror as his dog falls 726 feet to his presumably untimely end.

Calls to the Hoover Dam visitor center to find out more about the dog in the photo have gone unanswered, but Marvin Hagworth, spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation (which operates the dam) made these comment:

At a height of over seven hundred twenty feet, it's unlikely that a dog would survive the fall. In fact, he probably would land on one of the many structures at the bottom of the dam, rather than landing in the water, what with the prevailing winds and the apparent velocity of the dog in the photo, and those structures are made of concrete, so it wouldn't be a soft landing.

I've personally checked with the Dam operators, and they told me that there have been no reports of lost dogs at the Dam, nor any reports of animal carcasses appearing near the base of the dam."

Some animal rights groups have voiced their concern that the Frisbee may have been deliberately thrown over the edge of the dam, citing statistics that most dogs taken on family vacations are then abandoned hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Such a possibility cannot be ruled out at this time.

Spokesman Hagworth could not comment on whether the Hoover Dam visitor center would soon be ordering new warning signs for the visitor areas atop the dam, advising visitors not to throw any Frisbees or old tennis balls. Any such developments, Hagworth assured us, will be made available to the media.

The Djibouti girl, pictured at right, remains cautiously optimistic about the dog's fate. With no definitive evidence of the dog's whereabouts, she says, it's too early to jump to any conclusions.

Urinal Screen Changes Man's Life

"This urinal screen reached out to me and ended my downward spiral into the world of alcohol and illicit drugs."

San Francisco, CA - Robert Raydur, an entrepreneur from Chicago has become the new spokesman for Swisher Hygiene, a company which he credits with saving his life. On a business trip to San Francisco, Raydur stopped in the B Spot restaurant to use the restroom, where he saw Swisher's trademark urinal screen with its "Say No to Drugs" message.

"I went to the bathroom just before leaving the restaurant. I was planning to use drugs. Then I saw the screen at the bottom of the urinal. My life has been changed ever since that moment," Raydur told reporters.

"My family had tried to introduce me to Jesus, take me to AA meetings, but none of it worked. It's as if I had to hit bottom in my life, and that bottom was right at the base of that urinal."

Raydur will be touring the country, selling Swisher Hygiene products and services largely to fast food franchises, touting the strong anti-drug messages found on Swisher's urinal products.