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."
