Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images [updated] 731
Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!.
Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guessing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable". Update: 11/07 20:18 GMT by P : Google has a reasonable explanation.
Re:Another spin.. (Score:4, Informative)
Google just sucks (Score:5, Informative)
To verify this, try the following search "Obama convention". You'll get hits on Yahoo and Picsearch, but not Google. Goolge image search simply isn't timely. Their image index cycle appears to be about six months, and the Abu Ghraib pictures in (I think) around June.
If Google were truly censoring, they'd censor the text search too, and you can easily find the pictures using the text search.
Re:You're guessing? (Score:5, Informative)
An interesting case is booble.com - sent a takedown notice by google [booble.com] and now reopened as tauntedbytatas.com
Re:The OP makes a bad suggestion (Score:1, Informative)
Individuals are fine, but the group mind grinds against something in the rest of the world.
Complete FUD, really. (Score:5, Informative)
Abu Ghraib Photo's [antiwar.com]
Now, it is odd that their image gallery isn't equally pertinant, but I think it's more of a reflection on google having a poor image search engine or prehaps poorly maintained index....not some grand censorship conspiracy theory.
Re:Tried it and it's true. (Score:3, Informative)
~X~
"Torture, the American Way."
Google image search indexes rarely (Score:3, Informative)
For example, try searching on Red Sox, and you'll see nothing about the world series.
Try searching on presidential debates and you'll get no pictures from the Bush/Kerry debates.
I think it's probably safe to say it's just image crawler lazyness more than a conspiracy.
Re:And we voted for another 4 years of this... (Score:3, Informative)
Hope this helps.
Re:Google's just trying to keep perspective (Score:2, Informative)
And you didn't even mention INS lockups!
I can't even imagine...But if you are interested try reading this book
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/
Yeah, the Administration (Score:4, Informative)
Once again, your unfounded political bias shines through as total ignorance.
Re:Google just sucks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is this the work of Bush? (Score:5, Informative)
The so-called Patriot Act is bad, but it isn't a secret. Here's a link [epic.org] to the complete text. Here's another [aclu.org]. The ACLU didn't sue to see the complete Act. We (I'm not directly involved, but I'm proud to be a card-carrying member) sued to oppose certain actions under the act. The Act makes it illegal to disclose that some actions have been taken, e.g. that a search has taken place. That's why even mentioning the actions at issue was arguably illegal and a risk for the ACLU. Here's the ACLU press release [aclu.org].
The ACLU also took action, initially in the form of a Freedom of Information Act request, to find out how the government has been using the Act. Here's a link [aclu.org] to the ACLU's press releases on the initial FOIA request and subsequent activity. The ACLU has all sorts of information about the "Patriot Act" here [aclu.org].
Re:You're guessing? (Score:5, Informative)
"Google views the quality of its search results as an extremely important priority. Therefore, Google stops indexing the pages on your site only at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for those pages or as required by law. This policy is necessary to ensure that pages are not inappropriately removed from our index. Since Google is committed to providing thorough and unbiased search results for our users, we cannot participate in the practice of censoring information on the world wide web." source [google.com]
Re:Images Index Old (Score:5, Informative)
Even more clearly that this is not a sinister Bush
Rob just speculating this is government malfeasance is ridiculous. There is no evidence to support his positiona and no evidence to even suggest it. Slashdot should post a conspicious retraction to this groundless acusation. The story here isn't "Bush represses Google," it's "Google's image index isn't updated very often." Stick to reporting the news, please, not your tired conspiracy theories!
No Censorship Here (Score:3, Informative)
The pictures used to be there because Google Image Search updates about every 6 months and includes pictures from Google News. The Abu Ghraib pics aren't in Google News anymore, and they're not 6 months old, so don't expect to find them on Google Image Search.
Same thing with World Series, Obama, etc. Someone mentioned seeing Obama Senate pics, but they're wrong: search for Barack Obama and get pictures of him in the State Senate.
The idea that Google would just cave to a Bush Administration request to block searches for Abu Ghraib is ludicrous. Google has no reason to give in. Also, notice when the linked forum discussion at AnandTech began. In October, a month before the election. The Bush Administration would not have risked the bad publicity of attempting to censor a high-profile news source like Google for such a pointless task right before an election. These pictures are widely available and have already been seen by anyone who might be interested in them, so attempting to restrict access then would only have hurt both Bush and Google.
Do a regular Google search for Abu Ghraib pictures. Notice that all the links, to sites like antiwar.com, contain exactly what you'd expect. Moreover, Google News even pops up at the top, linking to this Slashdot story. Now, if Google were interested in censorship, wouldn't it be a simple matter for them to tell their news-accumulating bots to flag all stories involving their name and words like "censorship" for a human to review before posting them?
One try, I had no problem... (Score:1, Informative)
News results for "abu ghraib" "lynndie england" "charles graner " - View today's top stories
Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images - Slashdot - 1 hour ago
Lynndie England - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Lynndie England to Be Court-Martialed
no
Re:I'm certainly a tinfoil hat wearer but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Arab world (Score:3, Informative)
Pray tell, what can we do in Iraq or anywhere else where the government didn't want us there? Whatever you may propose in answer to this question, the first step will always be "remove that government", or you have a faulty understanding of the governments of the Middle East.
I tend to agree that killing people isn't necessarily the path to peace. But we are building schools and hospitals and relationships. Your apparent belief that the US is just over there, gunning people down, shows both your own lack of initiative in getting enough information to form your opinions and the failure of the news media to present an accurate picture of what is going on over there. If it bleeds, it leads, but bleeding isn't anywhere near the whole story.
The first step in "winning the peace" is re-writing the board so that we can win the piece. Hopefully we're near the end of that phase, but that does involve killing people who are violently insisting that they, and everybody else, will continue to live in the 12th century. I'd love to live in a world where all we had to do was ride over in our "Reading is Fundamental" Van and hand out books peacefully, but we don't live in that world.
Based on your post, you ought to be supporting our actions on the whole, even as you may criticize aspects of our actions. We don't need a new plan, we need more people to understand what the current one really is.
Re:You're guessing? (Score:2, Informative)
Messages that are distributed through the technologies, principally text in books, study guides and computer networks; sound in audio-tapes and broadcast: pictures in videotapes and broadcast; text, sound and/or pictures in a teleconference.
Official Respons from Google. (Score:5, Informative)
Sergey asked me to pass this on:
From me:In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.
In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib photos] [abu graib photos] [google.com] to get plenty of what you are looking for.
Please don't ascribe some dating issues on images to some political motive, we take this kind of stuff very seriously. We have to comply with the law, but there is no law yet on the books reguiring that companies in the United States take down pictures that might be embarassing ot the current administration.
Chris DiBona
Re:Tried it and it's true. (Score:5, Informative)
Full post here: with a note from Sergey about this [slashdot.org]
Chris
Re:Official Respons from Google. (Score:3, Informative)
Ahhh, but there will probably be on rather soon. To not pass one would be unpatriotic and hurtful to our troops.
Want to help them out?
Soliders need love too [anysoldier.com] Help keep up the morale.
Re:Official Respons from Google. (Score:5, Informative)
Chris DiBona
Re:Official Respons from Google. (Score:3, Informative)
In short, this proves once again that paranoid, imaginary conspiracies are more fun for some people than the truth.
Those "Halloween 2004" pictures are a year old! (Score:2, Informative)
Mod the parent down; he demonstrates nothing. Look at the results for "Halloween 2004 [google.com]"; the images all have comments from 2003. I get results for Abu Ghraib, too; they're also a little dated.
Jeez, this thread has TONS of FUD..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2360351.stm (Score:1, Informative)
Should Google decide what counts as an unacceptable website? Technology consultant Bill Thompson doesn't think so.
Since its creation in 1998 Google - at www.google.com, as you probably know already - has become the world's best search engine and the starting point of choice for almost all my web queries.
It has even generated its own verb - to do some googling around means sitting there playing with queries and exploring the obscure parts of the Web that are revealed by looking for odd or even improperly spelled phrases.
Nobody expects Google, or any index, to be perfect, since the Web is growing and changing so fast and many parts of it are generated from databases and therefore essentially impossible for a search engine to find or classify.
However, researchers at the highly-respected Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University have found that the company is actively removing sites from its database, and that this censorship is going unnoticed.
Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman have built up a reputation for their careful analysis of the ways in which web content is filtered, censored and controlled.
They have looked in detail at the practices of national governments, specifically China and Saudi Arabia, and provided lots of useful information for those of us who want to promote freedom of speech both online and offline.
The censorship of the French and German versions of the Google database is a clear demonstration of just what is wrong with internet regulation today.
Their latest paper deals with the differences between the results returned when searching google.com, the US/world version of the site, the French site at google.fr and the German site at google.de.
They have discovered over one hundred sites which can be found by searchers in the US but not by those in Germany or France.
They are mostly sites that feature racist material or that deny the existence of the Holocaust, such as Stormfront, a white pride site filled with white nationalist essays by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Responding to the discovery, Google spokesman Nate Tyler said on tech news programme ZDNN that the sites were removed to avoid the possibility of legal action being taken against the company, and that each site was removed only after a specific complaint from the government of the country concerned.
On first sight this seems perfectly reasonable - after all, Google isn't a public service but a private company trying to make money out of its technology and database, and it has no obligation to index everything.
It certainly has a duty to its owners (it's a privately held company) to stay out of legal battles with governments, since they can be pretty expensive.
Unfortunately things are not that simple, and the censorship of the French and German versions of the Google database is a clear demonstration of just what is wrong with internet regulation today.
What is happening is that a government is saying to Google: 'we don't like that website - so drop it from your database' and the company is acquiescing.
The people running the website aren't told. The people looking for the website aren't told - they aren't even told that this policy exists.
The rest of us aren't being told either - Google's Nate Tyler said clearly that 'as a matter of company policy we do not provide specific details about why or when we removed any one particular site from our index.'
The result is that one of the web's most important tools is being deliberately broken at the request of governments, with no publicity, no legal review and no court orders.
The sites involved may or may not be illegal in France or Germany - we don't know because the case never comes to court, and is never tested. All we know is that they aren't wanted.
I would rather have a net where Google and other search engine providers had a legal obligation to prov
Re:Official Respons from Google. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google just sucks (Score:3, Informative)
Oh? They're antonyms? "Google is turning evil and trying to censor our information!" That's pretty alarmist, and there's also plenty of people here willing to believe it based solely on the fact that "publicly traded corporations are EVIL!" which is group think. In this case, the former reinforces the latter. And frankly, around here, it happens that way far more than the opposite.
As for logic, I think your lack of any logical argument elaborating on why you think censorship isn't important speaks for itself.
I didn't say censorship isn't important. I said that in this case, it's not happening. Google's image cache is far out of date. Further, people have demonstrated that the only up-to-date pictures in the image index are those that are pulled in from the news section. That means that current news pictures may be found, but anything that's not current will expire from the news index and not show up in images any more either.
Those two facts easily explain this whole situation, as well as why Google would be "censoring" totally random things, like positive pictures of George W. Bush (no, wait, they're censoring both pro-Bush AND anti-Bush photos!!!!).
The sky is not falling. Google hasn't fallen into pure evil simply because they're a publicly traded corporation now (despite what many highly scored posts here would have you believe). But people here love to freak out and preach about the evils of capitalism, so this kind of story is Grade-A material.
Re:Google just sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Google's image index is, in general, far out of date. The only current images are pulled in from the news index. When news isn't current anymore, it falls out of the news index, and consequently falls out of the image index.
That explains this whole situation. It's reasonable, and far more likely than the "Google is censoring random stuff" theory.
However, when a story like this gets posted, you'll see one or two replies with the reasonable explanation, and the rest will be, "Google is censoring!" and "public corporations are evil, so Google is turning evil!" They have no evidence either, and the events can be more reasonably explained by non-conspiracy theories, but that's not what gets moderated up easily, and not what most people here want to believe.
Lots of people gather here to bash Microsoft and other large corporations, and talk about how they all want to oppress us, and to some extent, I agree -- corporations have too much control over governmental policy and such. However, since Google has become publicly traded, there have been lots of people around here promoting the idea that Google is suddenly becoming evil, and lots of people readily agreeing with them with no other evidence than, "corporations bad!"
I'm not a Google fanboy, or the fanboy of any other big, oppressive corporation. I probably shouldn't even care what people here think, because it's too small a population to make any real difference one way or another for most things. But the behavior here is very similar to branding people "unpatriotic cowards" as you suggest, and that behavior annoys me.
Please read the Wikipedia articles and help (Score:1, Informative)
I have spent the last few hours reading comemnts to this story. Many of them are very valuable. Some of you complain that it is hard to find informations and photos about the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. Others respond with important links and informations. It is a very interesting thread, containing fascinating facts and opinions. But instead of participating in that discussion, I would like you all to do something else. I would like to ask you all to read and to help expanding the Wikipedia articles on this very topic.
There is a very short stub article on Abu Ghraib [wikipedia.org]:
This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it [wikipedia.org].
There is also an article on Abu Ghraib prison [wikipedia.org] with a short Under the US-led coalition [wikipedia.org] section including:
You can also help by improving this section [wikipedia.org].
Finally, there is an extensive article on Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse [wikipedia.org] including all of the pictures which we are complaining are so hard to find with Google Images. (Caution: This article contains several morbid photographs that depict nude, abused, and deceased persons.) In my opinion that is the place to find pictures and informations about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. And that is also the place to write about it. Please don't get me wrong--I do think that Google Images search service is important, and I also believe that writing on Slashdot about those issues is even more important. But I think that this article on Wikipedia is the most important place to read and share informations about this scandal.
So please, everyone who has posted comments to this Slashdot story, everyone who has posted invaluable informations, links and facts, please spend few minutes reading and improving that articles on Wikipedia.
There is also the entire category of articles related to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse [wikipedia.org] on Wikipedia which includes these articles: Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse [wikipedia.org], Megan Ambuhl [wikipedia.org], Joseph Darby [wikipedia.org], Javal Davis [wikipedia.org], Lynndie England [wikipedia.org], Ivan Frederick [wikipedia.org], Charles Graner [wikipedia.org], Sabrina Harman [wikipedia.org], Janis Karpinski [wikipedia.org] and Jeremy Sivits [wikipedia.org].
Anyone can add something to any of those articles. You can either log in or post your edits anonymously. Even adding just few words can be very helpful.