White House Website Limits Iraq-Related Crawling

oscarcar writes "Dan Gillmor is reporting on the White House website's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere."

Funny

whitehouse.com doesn't have that problem.

"There ought to be limits to freedom" - G.W. Bush

Referring to a website critical of him (but correct in every detail)

Re:Funny

true. true. Apparently some poor fool [kuro5hin.org] made similar remarks on k5 a while back, and did indeed receive a personal visit from the SS. No charges filed, but 'tis a rude awakening indeed when your online words come and knock on your door.

Re:Funny

Also, TRUE God loving Americans would absoltely love to see that filthy, degrading website taken down because of the damage it causes to children who go there on accident.

I feel the same way about whitehouse.gov. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Drawing farfetched conclusions

possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere

Or possibly not...

Re:And your ...

Better explanation: Someone screwed up a search-and-replace in a major way. Many (most?) of those pages with "iraq" in them don't exist.

It looks like someone blocked off parts of the site to web-crawlers; I don't know for sure why all those blah/bloo/iraq entries are in there but they sure as hell don't lead to anything.

Censorship: 0
Screwups: 100

re: and your ...

what's that old saying? "never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity" or something like that?

let's not get reactionary here, folks. it wouldn't make sense to do what's being alleged:

1. every major journalist worth his/her salt would be all over it within hours. so it wouldn't succeed in obscuring information.

2. it would create an incredible backlash as soon as detected. what purpose would this serve?

ed

Re: and your ...

"1. every major journalist worth his/her salt would be all over it within hours."

Don't be naive. How long do you think that any mainstream journalist who made a story of this would have a job for? The answer - not long. The US media in particular, although the UK is getting as bad, is little more than a relay system for government propaganda and real, detailed, complete examination of government behaviour, with equal air time to truly dissenting opinions (how many times has Chomsky been on CNN in the past 4 months?) is out of the question. What the government does is Good and Right and Should Not Be Questioned.

Media by the elite, serving the elite.

Re: and your ...

every major journalist worth his/her salt would be all over it within hours. so it wouldn't succeed in obscuring information.

Where have you been living the past five years? Journalists don't criticize Bush.

They still have not published the fact that he deserted from the national guard during Vietnam and they practically ignored his DUI conviction.

The GOP has the media cowed with their constant 'liberal media' babble. There number of journalists who are prepared to hold Bush to account is tiny - Krugman, Conanston, Irvins, Alterman. After that its Al Franken, Jon Stewart and David Letterman.

it would create an incredible backlash as soon as detected. what purpose would this serve?

The chances that the mainstream media will pick this one up are very small. Just think how they would have reacted if it was Clinton!

Re: and your ...

The crux of this argument is that Bush missed some drills in 1972 while he was working on a political campaign in Alabama.

The crux of the matter is that he refused to have his pilots medical just after the Pentagon added a check for illegal drug use.

You can try to spin this whichever way that Karl Rove tells you but the facts are against you. The fact is that your great leader is a coward who ducked the draft and then deserted to avoid a drug test.

Re:And your ...

Well terrorists have been attacking us since we have been in Iraq till this point in time, but i guess that doesnt mean there is any link..... naaaah

Native people fighting against an occupying force are known as freedom fighters, not terrorists.

ry again sparky.

Re:Drawing farfetched conclusions

It really doesn't look like it. It looks like someone screwed up, because none of those directories appear to exist at all. I mean really, what are the chances of /firstlady/photos/2003/01/iraq actually having at some time contained real data?

It looks like someone did a

find . -type d|perl -e 'while(<>){print "${_}/iraq\n"; print "${_}/text\n";}' > robots.txt

I have no idea what the purpose would be, but it seems like a funny thing to do if you were trying to hide something.

By the way, who is going around looking at people's robots.txt files?

upside

it's good to see the whitehouse embracing technology so much.

Other, arguably more reasonable explanations

Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere."

Maybe, but I would think they might also be looking for "shady" spiders that ignored robots.txt. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few honeypot pages in there too.

Re:Other, arguably more reasonable explanations

Maybe, but I would think they might also be looking for "shady" spiders that ignored robots.txt. I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't a few honeypot pages in there too.

Oh, crap. I just plugged in /firstlady/images/iraq [whitehouse.gov], and now you tell me I'd better watch out. Damn this static IP address!

Quick, Slashdot that link before the Agents get to my cube!

Re:Other, arguably more reasonable explanations

Honeypot or not, look at robots.txt. It's creepy: just about every entry is an Iraq-related page, and there are a lot of entries. If they wanted to just have a few honeypots, that shouldn't involve that many entries, or so many with the common theme of Iraq.

Re:Other, arguably more reasonable explanations

How can they be Iraq related if they didn't exsist to begin with?

A question that GW gets asked all the time. :-)

Re:Other, arguably more reasonable explanations

Didn't think so, not a single one that I went to is a valid URL, and I highly doubt that they were valid to begin with.

From
http://www.bway.net/~keith/whrobots/disdirs.html

Some of the directories that 404 truly are empty of files. FOr instance:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/timeline/iraq

doesn't have files.

But at least some of the files that 404 above Do have files in the directory, just not an index file. For instance:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days

does not have an index page, so just entering that URL will give a 404.

However, the directory has the following files in it:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/100 days.pdf
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/int roduction.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t1.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t2.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t3.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t4.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t5.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t6.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t7.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t8.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t9.html
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/100days/par t10.html

All those files are excluded by the directory disallow entry in robots.txt

And, yes these files *are* relevant.

Someone's been busy

For instance:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/ 100days

Not any more.

Although the current Google cache [216.239.59.104] lists

/infocus/iraq
/infocus/iraq/100days/iraq
/infocus/iraq/100days/text
[snip 22 lines]
/infocus/iraq/photoessay/iraq
/infocus/iraq/photoessay/text
/infocus/iraq/text



the current robots.txt leaps from
/infocus/internationaltrade/text
to
/infocus/judicialnominees/iraq

Conspiracy theory over...

...or is it?

Queue somebody...

Queue somebody to take a crawler (hell, even a bash script using wget) to specifically archive these pages. Hell, they could even use a user-agent which doesn't look like a bot.

Of course, people would be less likely to trust random-Joe from the Internet than, say, The Wayback Machine, but I expect this is what will happen...

Re:A CLASSIC QUOTE...

Nothing's hidden, it's all there, it's all searchable from the white house website, just not from search engines.

Re:A CLASSIC QUOTE...

Nothing's hidden, it's all there, it's all searchable from the white house website, just not from search engines.

Correction: it's all there, as far as we can tell. How can I be sure that the results returned by the whitehouse.gov search engine are full and complete when google and all the other search engines have been partially crippled? There's no way to verify the completeness of the results -- I just have to take their word for it. Just like I was asked to take their word about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Paranoia aside, I object to these restrictions as a matter of principle. They're making it more difficult to access publically available information. It's not classified, and it never was. I, as a citizen of the U.S.A., have a right to know what my leaders have said and done.

Let's assume the whitehouse.gov search engine is completely honest, and faithfully returns a complete listing of all materials on the site having to do with Iraq. If that's so, then there should be no reason to disable other search engines, since their results would just confirm the internal results.

But the restrictions are in place, meaning that someone thought there was a good reason to do so. Restricting access makes it more difficult for people to research information pertaining to Iraq on the whitehouse.gov web site. Who are the people most likely to be doing that? Answer: journalists, activists, and concerned citizens. Obviously these restrictions aren't enough by themselves to dissuade a determined researcher; but it might slow them down. And it might actually stop a diffident researcher completely.

I'm not even going to go into scenarios where the whitehouse.gov search engine is not trustworthy, because serving up "doctored" speeches or information is highly unlikely. There are too many other archives to compare against, and it would be a major scandal if the administration was found to be altering records on its website. They'd have to be really, really dumb to do that.

The whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, though.

Re:A CLASSIC QUOTE...

The rules for transparency goes beyond merely 'not hiding' information. It is necessary to make information available from well know locations in the most convenient form practical. This, for instance, is why we have a congressional record rather than just binders of unsorted documents in a basement of some public building.

The other rule for transparency is that all material information be made available, kept, or destroyed in accordance to public regulation and individual policy. Individual policy must be consistent and decisions must be defensible based on policy.

The fact that people do not understand these two aspectsof transparency are what allow situations like Enron to develop. The later is what caused the destruction of Arthur Anderson. They have done nothing wrong, but they did not follow their own policy on document destruction, which made then look like at best idiots and at worst criminals.

We may compare this to other ventures to suggest policy. The NYT does not want google to cache articles because the NYT sells those articles after a certain time. Many other companies do not want deep linking because it reduces ad revenue. A fascist government may want to insure all users enter their site from a top page to make sure all users must go through the daily propaganda. A library tries hard to not track patrons so that no is afraid of using the library. The rational of the White House is beyond me.

The White House is not hiding documents. However, they are reducing the transparency of the government by limiting the avenues by which the public may access documents. Since the White House has stated many times that it believes in transparency, and in fact requires transparency when dealing with other governments, one can stipulate that transparency is the appropriate standard. So, until someone comes up with a policy that was developed and vetted through the normal processes used in the U.S., one has every reason to suspect nefarious motives.

And, if I may modify a statement that conservatives like to make, if you do not like transparency, go move to Iraq.

Re:Interesting allegation...

The complaint is they've done it before - "combat operations are done" became "major combat operations are done" when the fighting didn't stop. You can check here [differentstrings.info].

Compare the screenshots of what used to be on the white house website vs what's currently on the website.

Yes, I know, "how do we know this blogger didn't alter the screenshots?" You don't.

Re:EXACTLY

Nobody thinks Bush and Cheney are updating the website. Jeeze. But the folks that are running the website (and I would bet this extends down to the actual webmaster/tech guy) are political appointees who are there to make the president look good. That is their job. Their actions are all filtered through this political role.

Let's present an alternate scenario - since you have no evidence for yours, I don't have to present any evidence for mine.

It's May - Pres. makes his speech on the Carrier, the assumption by those-in-charge are that Chalabi's government will have control of the country within a couple of weeks and the US troops will be heading on home. The web folks (who want to make B & C look good) declare "combat's done! the troops are coming home! re-elect Bush!"

A few months later, that rosy scenario hasn't quite panned out. The aircraft carrier speech is becoming a liability for Bush - people started counting the number of dead troops in Iraq since he gave the speech, and it keeps going up. The web folks (who want to make B & C look good) say to themselves "this is a potential embarrassment to the president - let's see how we can make it less embarrassing."

And there you have it.

Just Ordinary Web Activity

There doesn't seem to be anything big about this. I understand the origins of the robots.txt file were about keeping robots out of infinite loops and unimportant large file trees, but everyone knows they are also used to prevent google from indexing stuff people would rather keep (semi) private.

If this was some crazy government conspiracy and they were trying to hide the information, why would they put it on their website? Could be any number of reasons they have done this perhaps they were getting loads of hits from google about iraq related things but if anyone really wants the information surely they can just visit it.

Re:Just Ordinary Web Activity

If this was some crazy government conspiracy and they were trying to hide the information, why would they put it on their website? Could be any number of reasons they have done this perhaps they were getting loads of hits from google about iraq related things but if anyone really wants the information surely they can just visit it.

Actually, the motivation around this could be to prevent caching of the documents, so that it's not so easy to compare differently dated versions of the same document. See this piece at Caltech [caltech.edu] for an example of how things change with time.

Interesting line

Disallow: /president/spongebobsquarepants_archive

I didn't know gee-dub likes SpongeBob too! My nephew is gonna flip out when he hears this.

Devil's Advocation Follows.

Perhaps their goal is simply so that when people google or whatnot for information on the Bush Administration and Iraq, they will be likely to find the Bush Administration's current views on and actions in Iraq, rather than outdated material?

Completely ignoring for the moment the fact that these views and actions are really somewhat embarrasing for the Bush administration, this really makes sense from a practical viewpoint. Few things are as annoying as searching for something news-ish and finding primarily material from two years ago. And after all, if they ONLY were interested in people forgetting the old materials, they could have just removed those materials from the site totally. (Though perhaps they were aware removing the materials completely would cause mirrors, which would be fully searchable, to spring up.)

Re:country is not at war

An honourable country would not keep people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without either giving them PoW status or charging them with a specific offence and giving them the right to a fair trial, including free, unhindered and unmonitored access to legal counsel.

Re:country is not at war

To be a POW you have to have been captured wearing a recognisable uniform, and be part of an established fighting force of a government. I suspect that many of the people captured met neither condition.

In which case they should be charged with something, either spying (unlikely if they were in their own country) or something else. They should then have the opportunity to defend themselves in open court with the ability to avail themselves of all the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [un.org] which the US has signed up to. If US soldiers in Britain arrested me, I would not be wearing a recognisable uniform because I am not part of the military or any recognisable fighting force of government. That does not give them the right to forcibly remove me from my home country and lock me up without ever even charging me with anything! The actions of Bush and his cohorts in the Whitehouse are absolutely disgusting.

Seriously though...

...possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere...

While anything is possible in politics, is it possible that the web admin is trying to limit the amount of traffic on the site? Is it possible that his analysis of the weblogs show a lot of traffic from robots looking for Iraqi-related info?

Questioning any statements put out by the WH ...

or even considering that previous statements might not match current statements means that the terrorists win. The WH Ministry of Truth works hard to ensure that the spin for the day gets out to the party faithful above the filters of "news" with their "facts" that don't gibe with the message we're trying to deliver.

If you persist in contemplating a world where whatever statements that the WH puts out, no matter how they might seem to contradict previous statements, are not totally true and correct, then a relocation expert from Guantanamo will be by in a few minutes. Just step away from the computer.

Everything Iraq....

It looks like 99% of the stuff related to Iraq is filtered out in robots.txt.

But not a problem, on google.com I just specify the site by saying 'Iraq site:whitehouse.gov' and it had 14,000 hits... the first one is the root of /infocus/iraq directory (which is dissallowed in robots.txt)

Re:Everything Iraq....

Well, yes it would still be in google's search results if the GoogleBot hasn't crawled the whitehouse site since the change was made.

Next time it crawls the site it won't read the forbidden directories and will delete them (if present) from the Google Cache, essentially erasing any official iraq history from google (and other search engines)

Truly Frightening.

Obviously, they're keeping people from accessing the top-secret teeball Iraq files [whitehouse.gov] ! Besides:

Disallow: /teeball/iraq/

check out these other frightening examples of censorship:

Disallow: /kids/spotty/iraq

Disallow: /kids/eggroll/iraq
Disallow: /kids/barney/iraq
Disallow: /easter/iraq
Disallow: /mrscheney/iraq
Disallow: /national-anthem/iraq

Truly frightening.

Barney, agent provacateur of the CIA? You Decide

Downloading the "robot.txt" file and doing a quick ctrl-f on different words, I discovered that there are six instances of "Barney" coming up in the robot.txt:

Disallow: /holiday/2002/barney/iraq
Disallow: /holiday/2002/barney/text
Disallow: /kids/barney/iraq
Disallow: /kids/barney/text
Disallow: /kids/photoessays/barney/iraq
Disallow: /kids/photoessays/barney/text

Which is the same number as "cheney", "powell" had 4, "saddam" didn't have any and "bush" only comes up with "bushpets".

Clearly, there is something to do with Barney and Iraq that The White House doesn't want you to know about.

myke

I, for one...

welcome our White House Robot Overlords. It would be funnier if it weren't true.

Diff between fact and fict: Fict must be believed

From 1984:

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem -- delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at this kind of thing. On occasion he had even been entrusted with the rectification of the Times leading articles, which were written entirely in Newspeak. He unrolled the message that he had set aside earlier. It ran:

times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

In Oldspeak (or standard English) this might be rendered:

The reporting of Big Brother's Order for the Day in the Times of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.

It does seem questionable...

It could be something innocent but really, why would anyone want to keep search engines out of a publicly funded website? People have been accusing the poster of "baseless accusations" but the guy does have a point. I've seen a couple of GW's speeches and afterwards the transcripts of those speeches and noted that gramatical errors were corrected. While this is only a minor offence in editing history it does make you wonder what other opinions and information may have appeared and then later have been edited. Seriously, these are our government officials here, we deserve to have an unedited record of what they say and to hold them to it. A little bit of speculation on the reasons for excluding various terms is far from paranoia.

Chris

related links

A couple of web sites that (1) have in the past done a great job of catching these kind of things, and (2) have mailing lists you can subscribe to:

• The Memory Hole [thememoryhole.org]

• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting [fair.org]

Here's a minor example of something those two sites didn't catch: Remember Iraq's so-called "mobile biological weapons factories" [fas.org]? A month after the story broke that they were for weather balloons [slashdot.org], the CIA moved their report's URL [informatio...house.info].

An intriguing fact about this whitehouse.gov/*/iraq thing is that they do in fact cover some of the important statements [bway.net] which are apparently not duplicated in the press release, conference, and briefing directories. Perhaps there was a "unique urgency" to cover up some poor choices of words?

Didn't work.

You found it didn't you? It failed... congratulations, you have somehow circumvented the government's website security system, prepare for the wrath of the DMCA, backed by none other than Bush himself!

Well either that, or it's simply preventing search engines from indexing honeypot type pages used for mis-information... Either or... but I like the first version... since it's more paranoid, and I have plenty of tinfoil ready to be shaped into hats... ;)

Not conspiracy, but I don't know what it *is* eith

If you try actually *loading* the directories listed in the robots.txt [whitehouse.gov], they don't exist. Not one. Not by going to their index.html or trying to find them through the site navigation. While they could still be accused of deleting them, many of the links are unlikely to have existed in the first place (http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/heartland-tou r-gallery/iraq? /president/holiday/decorations/iraq? /president/tee-ball-01/iraq? ) This may be just some IT grunt running a bad script on robots.txt.

Missing Iraq and 9.11 files

Looks like they removed a bunch of files where they were making claims that Saddam was behind 9/11. One could be lead to suspect that now that Bush got his war his doesn't need that lie anymore, and wants to erase all history of it since it undermines his authority.

Most of them are blocked because they're 404's

Most of the pages in the robots.txt are actually 404's and dont exist anymore. Its that simple. Keeps the robots from constantly requesting content that doesn't exist anymore. A few are blocked because they are bandwidth intensive videos and things, and some others are blocked for more mundane reasons I assume.

Wayback Machine

The Wayback machine does archive robots.txt, it seems like the whitehouse updates this file about every week or so. The current update happened after April 13th, 2003, and it simply took all of those references that said ".../.../.../text" and added /iraq as well.

Seems odd and pointless to me. I'd like a statement explaining it. A lot like the "Disallow: /hidden/passwd" kind of entries.

Take a look for yourself

Looks like someone just added IRAQ to all of the exsiting links. It's obviously some sort of search/replace/copy function. Go look for yourself, I found this one:

Disallow: /firstlady/recipes/iraq

Now, how many pages would this possibly block?

M@

Not just Bush

Before you get carried away with the Iraq issue, realize that most of these are just leftover from previous administrations:

Disallow: /~billc/pics/nudity/hillary
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/oral/monica
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/mf
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/mff
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/mfff
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/mm
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/gorebjs
Disallow: /~billc/mysexpics/goats

File looks auto-generated

It appears that this robots.txt file was probably auto-generated. It looks like someone used a script to crawl the sites entire directory structure appending /iraq and /text to every directory. In the process they seem to have created a pretty complete map of the sites underlying directory structure -- not necessarily a good thing.

Having said that, I'm not even sure that this robots.txt file would work the way it's supposed to. Seems like these iraq references should all have a trailing slash or a .html if they're actual pages.

Someone clearly doesn't want Google caching Whitehouse content on Iraq. The question is why? And how come they're so lame about it?

We are at war with Eastasia. Eurasia is our ally.

# robots.txt for http://www.ingsoc.gov/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /appointments/eurasia
Disallow: /appointments/eastasia
Disallow: /ask/images/eurasia
Disallow: /ask/images/eastasia
Disallow: /deptofhomeland/analysis/eurasia
Disallow: /deptofhomeland/analysis/eastasia
Disallow: /deptofhomeland/eurasia
Disallow: /deptofhomeland/eastasia
Disallow: /economy/eurasia
Disallow: /economy/eastasia
Disallow: /goodbye/eurasia
Disallow: /goodbye/eastasia
Disallow: /government/handbook/eurasia
Disallow: /government/handbook/eastasia
Disallow: /government/images/eurasia
Disallow: /government/images/eastasia
Disallow: /government/eurasia
Disallow: /government/eastasia


And now, an offering for the lameness filter...

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound tracks, photographs- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names. Everyone in the Records Department worked eighteen hours in the twenty-four, with two three-hour snatches of sleep. Mattresses were brought up from the cellars and pitched all over the corridors; meals consisted of sandwiches and Victory Coffee wheeled round on trolleys by attendants from the canteen. Each time that Winston broke off for one of his spells of sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, half burying the speakwrite and overflowing onto the floor, so that the first job was always to stack them into a neat-enough pile to give him room to work. What was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the world to another was considerable.

This was written in 1948. Things have really progressed!

1984: simple answer

There is a very simple explanation for this, as anyone who has read 1984 should know. In order for the glorious government to effectively serve the greater good, they need to be able to communicate changes of policy quickly and effectively. If, for instance, the enemy in a war changes, it is necessary to quickly update all documents that describe how evil the enemy are. Rather than manually editing all the documents, it is much easier to have one generic word, say "text", which can then be altered as appropriate:

sed 's/text/iraq/g'

sed 's/text/iran/g'

sed 's/text/cuba/g'

sed 's/text/belgium/g'

etc.

Obviously robots.txt just happened to be in the path!

Stupidity riegns supreme

So, am I to understand that the same administration that was smart enough to rig an election, Smart enough to cause 9/11, Smart enough to forge evidence and go to war is the same administration that came up with the brilliant plan of HIDING information by putting it in a PUBLICALY availible file?

Not a suprise

This really shouldn't shock anyone. It has been going on at the White House for ages. Look at this clip from the robots.txt file from 1998:
Disallow: /history/photoessays/blueroom/blowjobs
Disallow: /history/photoessays/blueroom/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/cabinetroom/blowjobs
Disallo w: /history/photoessays/cabinetroom/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/crosshalls/blowjobs
Disallow : /history/photoessays/crosshalls/temp/blowjobs
Dis allow: /history/photoessays/crosshalls/temp/text
Disallo w: /history/photoessays/crosshalls/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/diplomaticroom/blowjobs
Disa llow: /history/photoessays/diplomaticroom/text
Disallow : /history/photoessays/downstairscorridor/blowjobs
Disallow: /history/photoessays/downstairscorridor/text
Disa llow: /history/photoessays/easter/2002/blowjobs
Disallo w: /history/photoessays/easter/2002/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/easter/2003/defenselink/blowj obs
Disallow: /history/photoessays/easter/2003/defenselink/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/easter/2003/blowjobs
Disallo w: /history/photoessays/easter/2003/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/easter/one/blowjobs
Disallow : /history/photoessays/easter/one/text
Disallow: /history/photoessays/easter/three/blowjobs

Two conspiracy theory leaps

So, someone finds a problem with blocking search engine bots.

1) First, a lot of these docs involve Iraq. So, wihtout real factual information, it's assumed they're trying to do something fishy regarding Iraq info
2) Using that assumption, the next assumption is that they're purposely trying to keep people from trying to find contradictory statements.

This could all be true, or it couldn't be. Either way, by making two assumptions without any real facts is just pathetic yellow journalism.

I have no problem with this

Correct me if I am wrong but the data is still there right? Also, wasn't the purpose of robots.txt(that honor it) to stop crawlers from incessantly crawlign the page sapping your bandwidth? I just don't feel that this is a big issue. If they made it not searchable from the main whitehouse page, thats when I would have issues. They are just trying to save themselves bandwidth. Pages like these Iraq pages are peobably updated often. They'd be getting crawled constantly.

Is robots.txt enforceable?

So, if somebody like Google blatantly defied the robots.txt and crawled the entire site anyway, would this piss off the White House? We all know that robots.txt is a "gentleman's" agreement to not go certain places. It isn't an authentication or access control mechanism.

Would the White House sue for violation of the robots.txt file? Under what laws could they sue? Is robots.txt an implicit grant of permission to view copyrighted content? Would GWB press the Congress for a new bill, to mandate legal enforcement of the robots.txt?

That's probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it raises an interesting question. Is robots.txt legally enforceable? And if it was, would that be a good thing or a bad thing?

Your thoughts?

Re:More American Cencorship

American people should have some say in a situation like went on in Iraq.

They do, it's called voting, not to mention public opinion polls, which were near 70% for the invasion when the US invaded.

Re:More American Cencorship

Keep telling yourself that [scoop.co.nz].

And 70% of the people in this country STILL think that Saddam played some part in 9/11. What was your point again?

Re:Oh please

Congratulations to simoniker, poster of the most inanely paranoid comment I have ever read here on slashdot. And that's saying something.

I have to admit, when I first read the story I thought someone was being paranoid. But you really should RTF robots.txt file before you accuse the poster of being paranoid. The disallowed files are extraordinarily specific. I really can't come up with a plausible explanation beyond simoniker's.

Re:Oh please

This gets modded up as Insightful? I mean, the White House is routinely editing their trascripts, and if bots like Google and Wayback can go and find that no, Bush said that we found weapons, not a weapons program, then there goes Bush's latest FUD... *thud*. Just because it's a tinfoil hat worthy theory doesn't mean it isn't true... most aren't, but therein lies the issue: most.

Re:Oh please

If you think that's the most paranoid comment, you must not read any RFID tag threads here yet.

Re:Why the fuck does the government use robots.txt

You're right; the only reason you'd ever want to use robots.txt is to hide copyrighted information. You'd never use it to prevent a crawler from doing something like

GET /page1.php
GET /page1.php?skin=print
GET /page1.php?skin=decorated
GET /page1.php?skin=cool
GET /page1.php?skin=high-contract

...ad nauseum for every single page on your website. And I certainly don't use robots.txt to keep bots from following all of the "edit" links on my wiki site [honeypot.net] resulting in a huge number of "unauthorized access" log entries.

Nosirree, no legitimate webmaster would ever use robots.txt to gently guide visiting bots to the appropriate parts of the site and to keep them from trying to do silly things. The only possible use is to trample your rights while installing the new corporate-owned government.

Geez, people. Honestly.