Forget About It

Drapetomanic sent me a link to a page on Eszter Hargittai’s Web site that has a couple of screen caps of Web sites before and after September 11, 2001.

The three site designs feature the Manhattan skyline whose twin towers were quickly airbrushed from the pages. What’s striking is that the changes occurred within three months of the attacks, as if the polite thing to do is to immediately pretend the towers did not exist.

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On the flip side, the official Operation TIPS Web page has vanished. Here’s a cached version. The disappearance is probably related to Section 880 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 which declares that

“Any and all activities of the Federal Government to implement the proposed component program of the Citizen Corps known as Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) are hereby prohibited.”

Though that didn’t stop New York State from starting their own.

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Also gone from the Web is the scary logo and much information from the site of the Defense Department’s Total Information Awareness program. See a couple of screencaps of the site before and after. From news.com:

“If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers, and motor vehicle databases for police convenience in hopes of snaring terrorists.

First, biographical information about the TIA project leaders, including retired Adm. John Poindexter, disappeared from the Defense Department’s site last month. A mirror that one activist created from Google’s cache shows the deleted information included four resumes listing past work experience but no addresses or contact information.

Then, sometime in the last week, the TIA site shrank still more and some links ceased to work. The logo for the TIA project—a Masonic pyramid eyeballing the globe—vanished, a highly unusual step for a government agency. So did the TIA’s Latin ‘scientia est potentia’ slogan, which means ‘knowledge is power.’...

The disappearing documents come as the TIA has become a lighting rod for criticism and as online activists have been turning the tables on Poindexter by reposting his personal information and home telephone number as widely as possible....

The TIA project became public early this year when President Bush chose Poindexter, who was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, to run the Information Awareness Office. But criticism of the project from privacy advocates and newspaper editorial pages has spiked in the last month, and the Web deletions appear to have been in response to the increased public scrutiny.”