Editing history?

[vshnayder]

Who controls the past, controls the future.
Who controls the present, controls the past.


---- 1984 by George Orwell

In 1998, Time magazine published an article by George Bush Sr about why we didn't take over Iraq after the first gulf war. As you might expect, a lot of the reasons are still applicable today. However, fairly recently, the article was taken down from their website, and the table of contents of the issue was also modified so that it now looks like the article never existed. The text is available at:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm

This raises some interesting questions about the problems of online archiving. Of course, similar problems do exist with paper, but it's a lot harder to eliminate tons of paper copies that are distributed around the world than to modify the single master digital copy. At the same time, it is easier to store and duplicate digital copies. So the problem isn't so much technology as the policies and conventions of how we use it.

A relevant project about long term archives for digital info (that I heard about since one of the new profs here at Harvard works on it) is:
http://lockss.stanford.edu/

I'm somewhat disturbed by the fact that as far as I know, this hasn't been talked about at all in any mainstream media. Those you with a larger readership than mine should post this to your blogs...

Thoughts?