Orwell's "Memory Holes" are here... Screenshot & Save your Sources

In George Orwell's 1984, the Ministry of Truth employs the protagonist of the novel for sending information that contradicts party lines down a chute into a "memory hole," where it never seen again.


From Wikipedia:

A memory hole is the alteration or outright disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive. The Memory Hole is a website whose goal is to preserve those documents which are in danger of being lost, and there are a number of other websites with similar goals.

en.wikipedia.org...


I suggest we start saving copies of internet websites that make hard points against conventional wisdom that is not in the best interests of the state, and even make efforts to spread around information that is subdued.


Some examples I'm personally aware of:

Engineer Society Accused of 911 Cover-Ups (Google purging its news articles, also many other sources)
Youtube Censoring Sheen's Video to Obama (YouTube freezing views and preventing videos from making front page)
Neptune's Mass Recalculated (Information sources being cut back to only a few)


The article featuring engineers accusing the ASCE of corruption was purged from many different news sites, despite being an Associated Press article, and now when even search for the article on Google, it only returns second-hand links to the article unless you search for specific quotes found in the original article. The article also never had a single follow-up article, and despite the ASCE saying it would do an investigation and release a report, I can't find a damned thing about that, either.





It's hard to prove any particular article removal is ever intentional "memory holing," but I know Google holds on to all kinds of information.

Here Google still has scans of a newspaper from 1998, for example, related to Bill's BJ in the oval office: news.google.com...,6033774&dq=sources&hl=en "Lewinsky, Currie accounts differ on gifts returned, sources say ."

Yet they can't hold on to an AP article from 2008 that accuses the ASCE of corruption involving the WTC and Katrina investigations...


Did I mention Google owns YouTube now and is also tied to the CIA, FBI and NSA?

CIA enlists Google's help for spy work

Google has been recruited by US intelligence agencies to help them better process and share information they gather about suspects.

Agencies such as the National Security Agency have bought servers on which Google-supplied search technology is used to process information gathered by networks of spies around the world. ...

In the most innovative service, for which Google equipment provides the core search technology, agents are encouraged to post intelligence information on a secure forum, which other spies are free to read, edit, and tag - like the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Depending on their clearance, agents can log on to Intellipedia and gain access to three levels of info - top secret, secret and sensitive, and sensitive but unclassified. So far 37,000 users have established accounts on the service, and the database now extends to 35,000 articles, according to Sean Dennehy, chief of Intellipedia development for the CIA.

"Each analyst, for lack of a better term, has a shoe box with their knowledge," Mr Dennehy was quoted as saying. "They maintained it in a shared drive or Word document, but we're encouraging them to move those platforms so that everyone can benefit."

The collection of articles is hosted by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and is available only to the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies.

Google's search technology usually rates a website's importance by measuring the number of other sites that link to it - a method that is more problematic in a 'closed' network used by a limited numbr of people. In the case of Intellipedia, pages become more prominent depending on how they are tagged or added to by other contributors.

As well as working with the intelligence agencies, Google also provides services to other US public sector organisations, including the Coast Guard, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

I have also seen numerous video clips containing explosions at the WTC complex or witnesses providing testimony to explosions removed from YouTube such that I can no longer find a single copy of them, and searching Google for other copies of the video clips obviously doesn't help. So I have started saving as many flv files and other hard-to-find video clips that I can, for fear that they will be permanently removed from the net the way I have seen them removed from YouTube.


If you're going to save videos or other sources, maybe even change file names and make them hard to find, or store them on CDs or flash drives, because apparently it isn't above them to send trojans onto your computer to delete your files:

In an ironic twist of fate, in 2009, Amazon.com's electronic book, the Kindle, was purged of copies of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm. Customers who earlier downloaded those books, found them surreptitiously erased from their Kindles, in what some said was the books' being "sent down a memory hole."[4] The book retailer denied accusations of "Big Brother-like behavior", and stated that the books were uploaded to the Kindle store by a publisher who did not have reproduction rights, thereby necessitating the deletion. "We removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers," a spokesman said.[5] Some critics likened this to Barnes & Noble selling a book, then burglarizing a house to reclaim it whilst leaving a check. Amazon.com stated that they might not repeat the actions in the future.[6] A Shelby Township, Michigan student is the lead plaintiff in a proposed class action lawsuit, which claims that his annotated notes for a class were rendered "useless" when his Kindle's copy of 1984 was purloined using secret technology to invade his computer via an undisclosed Trojan horse.[7]

en.wikipedia.org...

[edit on 31-12-2009 by bsbray11]

Good looking out sir! I'm sure that the TPTB get all kinds of help purging important/implicating information from their corporate lap dogs like google. I mean they all want the same thing anyways right? To enslave the rest of us I mean. Yes we must do our best to keep the internet free and the information about what's really going on available for all! S&F.

reply to post by bsbray11


This is not good. There is only one company doing this work, www.archive.org WayBack Machine.

However, I don't doubt they would also delete their cache's copies of a story.

While doing research on chemical substances like fluoride, Archive.org WayBack Machine proved to be an invaluable tool.

I do this whenever it seems like there's something important. I would even suggest printing and keeping pictures and saving stuff to an external object, so people can't delete it off your computer too.

Whoops, looks like you said that, that's what I get for skimming.

[edit on 31-12-2009 by Phlynx]

[edit on 31-12-2009 by Phlynx]

Just an example to add here.

Anyone who reads the mediaeval church's history, will immediately notice Martin Luther's refutations being pinned on the door and after that being arrested.

While Luther was in prison, Machiavelli thought about doing the church's own Latin translation of the Bible and using their translation against the reformers'.

Knowledge versus Knowledge is a tactic created by Machiavelli.

It becomes hard to discern which version of a given knowledge/fact is the correct one.


[edit on 31-12-2009 by jjjtir]

S&F... And the uncomfortable truth that keeps me reluctant from activity ATS is now a "memory hole" .. I have a screen shot but I'd rather not post it.

S&F OP!

reply to post by Solar.Absolution


May I inquire as to what you're talking about?

Sounds interesting.

while the idea of preserving all this data may be "nice" the practicality is zero. firstly people forget or die so it will be eventually lost if it is wanted by someone powerful.

and then there's the financial reality that storage space is expensive. sure you'll come back arguing that you get a huge drive for pennies per GB but you have to factor in the fact that most companies don't use consumer grade drives but rather highly expensive hardware like SANs and whatnot. adding extra space to these acronyms costs a lot. the cheapest solution? remove data that's older than a certain time period or that has less hits than other data.

you can call it memory hole of course...

reply to post by DarkSecret


You can go to Google's news archives and look back into the 90's and still find all kinds of stuff, still hosted by Google itself. Above I posted an example, of an article of trivial importance even to the Monica Lewinski scandal from 1998, which wasn't even just an article but an actual scan of a newspaper. Yet a 2008 Associated Press article talking about the ASCE scandal was already purged from their records, and I'm sure it wasn't because it wasn't 'getting enough hits'.

Did you read about the services they are providing the FBI, CIA, NSA, and military? Giving agents their own discussion board, "Intellipedia"?

You get around to suggesting I'd believe it was purged intentionally no matter what, but you know I think you would assume they are innocent of such a thing no matter what.

THAT...is a great idea!!! I'm aware of some applications that will download an entire site (or just an HTML page and it's images, etc.)...however...is there an application that will download and compile the download into an EXE (executable) or something for permanent, self contained storage?

If not...that would make a nice browser plug-in.

Originally posted by WeAreAWAKE
THAT...is a great idea!!! I'm aware of some applications that will download an entire site (or just an HTML page and it's images, etc.)...however...is there an application that will download and compile the download into an EXE (executable) or something for permanent, self contained storage?

If not...that would make a nice browser plug-in.

There are a few firefox ones that do things like that, and 'bots' do this all the time, that's the main technique google use to catalogue the entire world!!!! (A little like the Infosphere in futurama? The final thing is to scan it's self and then.... dun dun duuuunnnn!!).

But yhea bot's are constantly running around the internet scanning and downloading / storing stuff for any number of organisations and reasons, your posts here for instance are most likely run over by bots, once I configured my browser so that I appear to web sites as a google bot - what happened was that sometimes I didn't have to log into some sites, they let the google bots right in to index the site - other times adverts didn't bother with me, stuff like that.

Of course other people use bots for naughtier purposes - form 'bot nets' from zombie machines (don't that sound so apocalyptic!?) - then they could sell this 'army', or rent it out to someone who wants to do anything from a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, or distributed computing or something...

So, a year from now or something you go dig something out of your archive how do you prove it is real? All the skeptics here, and elsewhere will claim its something you faked if it can't be found online.
sad but true.

If I think its interesting enough, I print it, (ink onto paper) I'd like to see 'them' purge my printed archives, I suppose they would burn my house down to make sure?
So, as well as electronic archive, print it as well, then put it in a fire proof
filing cabinet.
Good luck in this new year.

reply to post by pikestaff


I never read a case of a personal residential house burning, but I did read that they can and have burned libraries books in broad daylight operation, mysteriously flooded archival buidings in a time where laser printers were not widely used and inkjet was common so the contents would bleed out and blur with water, etc

Don't ask me for the links of these example stories, I read them over the course of my very first conspiracy website to today at ATS, so the links are long gone from my browsers 3-month history logs.

---

But to comment on the topic, although George Orwell and Aldous Huxley books are very good and shocking modern examples, this tactic of knowledge against knowledge concept was first thought out and put to use in the mediaeval Middle Ages, or should I say Dark Ages, by no less than Machiavelli.

Starred and flagged. Excellent post. I had read something awhile back about Google tied in with the CIA. Then again, the CIA has ties with almost all the informational gathering and what we know about is probably only the tip of the iceberg (and this iceberg ain't melting-it's growing larger).

I save all my important stuff to thumb drives / flash drives - have about eight of them now chalked full of stuff. One for music, eyecandy, ebooks, pictures, websites, movies, articles, quotes, photos, system programs, recipes, the possibilities are endless.

For websites, I simply "select all", "copy" and paste into MSWord (I have MSW 2007) and than save as and save directly onto my website thumb/flash drive. For music, films and pictures you just either drag and drop or save as and save directly onto the flash drive.

And you are most correct, as each year goes by little by little more "anti TPTB" stuff seems to disappear. I've got articles, ebooks, video / films and whole websites that have now "disappeared".

Maybe some of this stuff is removed just to clear up space or due to the cost of maintaining a website. I suspect some of the sites / information is removed because if enough people woke up from their slumber in this Matrix we call reality the general populace would be harder to control.

Anytime I find stuff that is really interesting I copy paste and save the sucker to my thumb drives I'm up to about eight of them (most of my flash/thumb drives are 8gbs each and that is more than enough space to save everything your heart could desire.)

Wow, nothing beats a thumb/flash drive nothing - whoever invented them is beyond a rock star!

Amazing how wonderful these storage devices are! Well worth the money. One last detail, saving your important stuff onto a flash / thumb drive keeps them safe from system crashes and hackers.

If you have something you absolutely want to keep safe, put it on a Flash/thumb drive.

[edit on 1-1-2010 by ofhumandescent]

reply to post by ofhumandescent


One little EMP and color your flash drives gone. At least if you write to cd it might be recoverable someday.

reply to post by Chett


I do copy source too. but if it's gone and nobody wants to believe than hey at least I have the article, ebook, website screen shot.

You are right though, no longer can you just "say it" now everyone is like a DA in court you have to back everything up with proof.

Good point / starred.

reply to post by Chett


Most computer cases are metal... Earth that case out and would you not have a faraday cage?? ..... Maybe we can make tinfoil hats for our..... Nah that would be silly, right?

reply to post by Chett


Good point and I thought CD's were outdated.

Possibly having a paper copy might also be the way to go.

God, hope we never have a EMP - I've become very attached to my flash drives.



Then again, one good EMP and we are back to the stone age, that would be the least of our worries.

Okay, what does one need to do to protect their beloved flash drives - Answer right here: preparednesspro.wordpress.com...

and here: www.preparednesspro.com...

reply to post by ofhumandescent


Ya an EMP kinda spells the end of life as we know it, at least for a while. But I would rather store important stuff on cd or paper, just in case. Truth is too easy for rogue states to do that.