Google Appeals Moronic Court Order Demanding It Hunt Down Third Party Sites And 'Take' Offending Content 'Back'

from the the-googlenet dept

Search engines own the internet. The rest of us are just renting space. At least, that's what a Texas court seems to believe. Google is in court fighting a gag order telling it to chase down and remove certain mentions of a certain lawyer from the internet. (via WaCon)

[I]n a stunning and all-encompassing gag order signed over a year ago and now being appealed to Houston's 1st Court of Appeals, attorney Calvin C. Jackson, who was accused of forging attorney signatures on court records, demands Google erase all mention of those accusations from the entire Internet including other websites.

Jackson, who settled over these allegations (details also under a gag order), now wants it all to just go away. And he's gotten a Texas court to agree with him. Not only does he want the past erased, he's also seeking to bar "Google" from ever mentioning this unpleasantness again. So, we have both prior restraint and an impossibility, all wrapped up in a terrible gag order.

The requests Google is fighting play right to the edges of the "ridiculousness' envelope. Cleaning the internet isn't like expunging a criminal record, but this Texas court apparently feels Google (and other search engines) should be able to just go around deleting stuff, even stuff they doesn't own (which would be pretty much all of it).

The gag order, signed by visiting San Antonio Judge Richard Price in February 2013, forces Google and other search engines to wipe out all record of the allegations from the Internet. It also compels the search engine to find third parties who posted the information to get it back and destroy it.

"Get it back?" The hell? Does this judge really believe Google can just knock on the door of other sites and demand they hand over the "hard copy?" Once again, we have someone with power mistaking his home page for "The Internet." Google and other search engines index the web. They are not in charge of the web.

Judge Price doesn't seem to have any idea how Google is supposed to prevent future discussions of this case from appearing anywhere on the web. He just seems to feel a big company like this should be able to do anything he imagines it can. If he ever decides to leave the judicial racket, I'm sure the MPAA can set him up with an office, if UK Prime Minister David Cameron doesn't snatch him up first.

Let's not worry about that First Amendment. Let's just let Calvin Jackson control his past and future via court orders. Except that's not working out very well for him. The order may be sealed but the gag order doesn't cover this sort of discussion, or Google's arguments against prior restraint and impossibility. All he's done (with the court's blessing) is ensure more discussion of past allegations. And until this order gets reversed, every site discussing this (like us) will apparently be waiting for Google to knock on the door and ask that we turn over our "originals."

Filed Under: calvin c. jackson, deleting history, gag orders, internet, liability, search, texas
Companies: google

UK Political Party Tries To Dump 10 Years Of Speeches Down The Memory Hole

from the because-that-ALWAYS-works...-ALWAYS dept

Every so often a public figure will come to the dubious conclusion that the past can be erased. This was a difficult proposition even before the advent of the internet. These days, it's nearly impossible. But long odds rarely deter the particularly inspired… or particularly stupid.

Some abuse the easily-abusable laws in European countries to generate memory holes. Max Mosely has been fruitlessly pursuing the removal of so-called "not actually a Nazi orgy" photos for years. Others simply blunder around, issuing baseless legal threats and questionable DMCA notices. Others, like the UK Conservative Party, do their own dirty work.

Being willing to wipe your own collective memory takes a special kind of bravery, the kind often associated with reckless acts shortly preceded by the phrase, "Hold my beer."

pixelpusher220 was the first to send in the ComputerWeekly story which details the efforts the UK's Conservative Party recently made to eradicate an entire decade's worth of speeches from the internet.

The Conservative Party has attempted to erase a 10-year backlog of speeches from the internet, including pledges for a new kind of transparent politics the prime minister and chancellor made when they were campaigning for election.

Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.

But the Conservative Party has removed the archive from its public facing website, erasing records of speeches and press releases going back to the year 2000 and up until it was elected in May 2010.

The Conservative Party did more than simply delete the speeches from its site. It also blocked out Google and the Internet Archive using an extensive addition to its robots.txt. This is just a small excerpt of conservatives.com's bot blocking additions.

Disallow: /News/News_stories/2000/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2001/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2002/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2003/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2004/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2005/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2006/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2007/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2008/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2009/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/News_stories/2010/05/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2000/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2001/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2002/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2003/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2004/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2005/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2006/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2007/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2008/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2009/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/Speeches/2010/05/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2000/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2001/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2002/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2003/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2004/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2005/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2006/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2007/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2008/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2009/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/01/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/02/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/03/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/04/
Disallow: /News/Articles/2010/05/

So, how did it get the Internet Archive to remove its historical collection, something ComputerWeekly writer Mark Ballard likens to "sending Men in Black to strip history books from a public library and burn them in the car park?"

Well, apparently the Internet Archive treats changes to robots.txt files as retroactively applicable. Once the bot blocker informed IA it was no longer welcome to crawl these pages, it erased the corresponding archives as a "matter of courtesy."

By making this change, the Conservative Party was able to eliminate 1,158 "snapshots" the Archive had gathered over the last 14 years, a rather breathtaking eradication accomplished without ever having to strong arm internet historians or stare down Google directly.

The Conservative Party has offered no comment on the slash-and-burn of its own history, simply saying it has passed along the query to its "website guy."

Now that the speeches (and the Archives) have been removed, conservatives.com's robots.txt has been trimmed down to something more manageable.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /XMLGateway/
Disallow: /sitecore/
Disallow: /users/
Disallow: /flash/
Disallow: /pdf/
Disallow: /layouts/site.aspx
Disallow: /Activist_centre/
Disallow: /News/Blogs.aspx
Disallow: /News/Blogs/
Disallow: /sitecore/
Disallow: /Get_involved/Join/Friend.aspx
Disallow: /Get_involved/Join/Member.aspx
Disallow: /Get_involved/Join/Youth.aspx
Sitemap: http://www.conservatives.com/xmlFeeds/GoogleSitemap.aspx

A search through its xml sitemap confirms that nothing remains of the pre-2010 speeches. The earliest speech listed in the xml file is from June of 2010. Users browsing the site will be hard pressed to find any speeches earlier than January of 2013, however. Searching through the sitemap will uncover direct links to earlier speeches but clicking the "Archive" button to view older speeches automatically limits results to 2013. Here's the shady URL the "Archive" button leads to:

http://www.conservatives.com/News/SpeechList.aspx?SearchType=NewsDate&SearchTerm=130101-131231

So, why are these speeches being buried? Perhaps it has something to do with the Cameron's promises of government transparency and accountability made while campaigning, something he increasingly lost interest in once in power.

"Above all, the power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power - whether it's government, big business, or the traditional media," said Cameron, who was then campaigning for power as leader of the Conservative opposition.

Cameron was going to make sure the information revolution would hold people like prime ministers to account, he said another speech on 11 October 2007, at the Google Zeitgeist Conference in San Francisco.

"It's clear to me that political leaders will have to learn to let go," he said then. "Let go of the information that we've guarded so jealously."

Transparency would make public officials accountable to the people, said Cameron then. He was riding at the front of the wave that would wash us into a new world, and a new age.

Like many politicians, transparency and accountability sound like great ideas when you're lapping up applause (and votes) and hoping to stick it to your legislative adversaries. But it swiftly loses its luster the first time it's applied to you and your activities. Then it's back to the old ways that have "worked" for years. Obfuscation, opacity and a growing tendency to view your constituents as the enemy swiftly replace the campaigning ideals.

Years down the road, after many years at the helm, this viewpoint realignment culminates in running a decade's-worth of empty promises through the internet shredder in hopes of trimming down the number of irate citizens using your own words against you.

Unfortunately for those manning the shredder, they seem to have missed another set of archives, one located in their own backyard. A commenter at ComputerWeekly points out that the Conservative Party site has been archived by the British Library since 2004, and many of those supposedly vanished speeches are only a few clicks away.

All this effort will do for the Conservative Party is make it look worse. There's zero net gain to be had here. Nothing completely vanishes from the net and even if the Internet Archive may err on the side of courtesy in its efforts, others will be saving, securing and stashing the same documents and webpages certain entities wish to remove from the public eye. The harder they try, the more likely they are to fail.

Filed Under: archive, conservative party, deleting history, history, internet, speeches, uk