Volume 4, Issue 1: January - February, 2003

Contents Cover Story     Doctored Documents Articles     Perspective     Sue’s Review     Poem     Toon Features     Buzz     News Links     Redirect

Doctored Documents by Susan Wishnetsky, Treasurer, ASFAR   Twenty years ago, I entered the School of Library Science of the University of Michigan.  At the time, in 1983, the first few brave libraries were experimenting with computerized library catalogs—still keeping their card catalog drawers up-to-date, just in case.   I took a course on government documents.  I didn’t do too well in that class.  All the documents were printed on paper, of course, dusty volumes shelved in the gloomiest section of the library.   The internet was barely born.  There was little our professors could teach us about our future careers in online searching and electronic maintenance of information—not much to show us, not much for us to practice on.  But the internet, they warned us, was going to be big.   That fall, a lot of people bought and read George Orwell’s 1984.  Just as people worried in 1999 about the coming year 2000, people in 1983 superstitiously seized upon those four ominous digits.  In the midst of a bellicose Reagan administration (as it seemed at the time), many wondered if the repressive government described in that book might be just around the corner.   In 1984, the concept of truth was that of an ongoing series of revisions, based upon what served the current interests of the all-powerful government.  Vast numbers of government workers toiled at the sole task of keeping all available information continuously in line with the current version of  “truth,” altering or destroying documents to ensure universal conformity with the daily versions of facts and events issued by “Big Brother,” the symbolic leader of the state.  Any citizen who displayed doubt or disbelief of the official government versions would almost surely be arrested and ultimately executed.   But my fellow library school students and I would serve as the guardians of information in the years to come.  We stood ready to protect our collections of “truth” against censors or vandals with razorblades, or thieves ... or even government officials!   A lot has happened in twenty years.  There’s scarcely a library in the country that still uses a card catalog.  The majority of  newspapers, popular magazines and technical journals are now available online, and more and more subscribers—including libraries—are purchasing these materials in online formats only.  A few government documents are now being issued exclusively online, the printed versions discontinued to save money.   We all know that web sites can move, change, and disappear.  A newspaper article may be freely accessible for one week after it is published, then moved to an “archive” section and made available for a fee.  A link to a web page today may not work tomorrow.  The contents may radically change.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the contents belong exclusively to the owner of the web site.   But when online documents are bought and paid for by others, as in the case of online publishing, web site owners must guarantee their purchasers continued access to that content.  The content must remain as it appeared when it was purchased; any necessary revisions should be included in notes, or in new editions of the work, with the original text unaltered.  If a document is moved, purchasers must be informed of its new web address.   U.S. government documents are paid for by citizens of the United States, and are therefore the people’s documents.  Whether they are issued in print or electronically, the people have the right to know that, except for certain classified or internal documents, the information that is compiled and produced with their tax dollars will be there.   After September 11, 2001, thousands of online documents began to disappear from the sites of the U.S. Defense and Energy Departments, and the U.S. Geological Service asked libraries to destroy its CD-ROM of a certain geological survey.  The Department of Transportation removed airport security data, and the Environmental Protection Agency deleted chemical plant information.  While all those incidents were worried about and argued about, they were certainly understandable—to protect national security.  Maybe the government overreacted, but most of us wanted to ensure that anything that might aid terrorists would be kept from them.   In the past few months, however, users of government web sites have noticed new changes in the documents available, changes with no connections to national security, but with big connections to the ideology of the current administration.   The first report of such information-tampering came in a September 18, 2002 article in Education Week, viewable at <http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=03web.h22>.  John P. Bailey, the Department of Education’s newly-appointed Director of Education Technology, had issued a directive to senior staff members on May 31 to remove “outdated” material.  All material posted before February 2001, according to the article, was to be removed unless “needed for legal reasons or it supports the ‘No Child Left Behind Act’ of 2001—the president’s key education measure—or other administration initiatives.”   On October 21, Rep. Henry Waxman sent a letter, co-signed by 11 other House members, to Department of Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson about the disappearance of information from the web site of the Centers  for Disease Control.  The letter, viewable at Rep. Waxman’s site at <http://www.house.gov/reform/min/inves_admin/admin_hhs_info.htm>, expressed concern about the disappearance of a CDC online document on educational programs proven to reduce risky behavior among adolescents, as well as a fact sheet on the effectiveness of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.  It also noted that information debunking the myth that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer had been removed from the site of the National Cancer Institute, a National Institutes of Health program.   At least two of the three documents listed above have since returned to their original locations, but in greatly altered forms.  On the National Cancer Institute web site, the revised document “Early Reproductive Events and Breast Cancer” (formerly called “Abortion and Breast Cancer”) now states that studies on this topic have yielded “inconsistent” results (the original document clearly stated that induced abortions did not increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer).  The fact sheet on condoms reappeared without its illustrations and explanations of correct condom use.  The new fact sheet omits the (formerly-included) findings that sex education doesn’t encourage people to have sex sooner, but adds a new paragraph emphasizing that abstinence is the only reliable method of birth control and sexually-transmitted disease prevention.   “This goes on all the time in science,” responded William Pierce, a Department of Health and Human Services spokesman.  “Our goal is to ... reflect the most up-to-date scientific thinking.”  But in fact, this is a new phenomenon.  Availability of documents online has become widespread only in the past decade or so.  Before that, links to documents were too unreliable to be considered viable alternatives to paper by libraries or researchers.  And in the past, if certain texts were considered outdated or found to contain errors, the solution was not to alter or destroy the old texts, but to add new ones which presented arguments against these supposedly discredited beliefs.  In America, when we encounter speech with which we disagree, the appropriate response is more speech ... not censorship!    The original and revised versions of the two documents mentioned above can be viewed at  Rep. Henry Waxman’s site.  But what about other alterations or deletions of documents that may not have been noticed yet?   A non-profit organization called “Internet Archive”—<http://www.archive.org/>—maintains a database of old versions of web pages.  By entering a URL in what they call their “Wayback Machine,” you can view a web page as it looked on various dates in the past.  The URL of the fact sheet on condoms, <http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/facts/condoms.htm>, does reveal the difference in the document as it was originally posted and as it appears today.  If there are any particular documents you suspect of being altered, you can try testing your theory with this database.  But the “Internet Archive” program will remove pages from its database upon request by the web site’s owner, and government sites are not excluded from this policy.  One can argue that the “owners” of government web sites are the people of the United States, but those who run the program may not take that view.  So the continued reliability of this method of proving tampering remains to be seen.   A special task force has been formed by the American Library Association’s Government Documents Round Table (GODORT), to try to keep tabs on the disappearance or alteration of government documents online.  If you do find any clear cases of changed or missing documents, e-mail Sherry DeDecker at <dedecker@library.ucsb.edu>, or any of the other GODORT task force members listed at <http://www2.library.unr.edu/dept/bgic/Duncan/RAGI.html>.  (This page also includes a list of links to articles on this topic.)   But, you may be asking, what makes this an important issue for youth rights?  The policies expressed by government agencies, in any recent administration, have been so hostile to the idea of youth rights in every form that any new policies or ideologies on the subject could hardly be much worse!  We’ve seen punitive zero tolerance policies, forced medication of more (and younger) kids, loss of free speech rights, new laws restricting driving and access to video games ... not to mention the practice of allowing kids, with none of the rights of adults, to be tried as adults if they are accused of certain crimes, and even to be sentenced to death!  It would seem that any alteration to the public record, in a land that treats its youth so badly, would have to be an improvement.   Obviously, if this trend were to continue, it would have implications for many groups and sections of society far beyond the youth rights movement.  But much of the suppressed and altered material mentioned above does seem to have a connection with youth policies: education, sexual activity, risk behaviors.  And we might turn out to be very wrong to think that our nation’s policies toward youth couldn’t possibly get any more repressive!   It’s true that the youth rights movement generally has little use for government documents that express official policies or draw conclusions from data.  We do refer to court decisions that have been favorable to our cause ... but the disappearance or alteration of court documents seems highly unlikely.   The greatest loss for us would be the disappearance of source data, statistics gathered and compiled by government bodies, data we can examine, and about which we can come to our own conclusions.  This type of data has been used in previous issues of Youth Truth; for example, data from National Vital Statistics Reports and the CDC Fact Book was cited in our article “Why Children Die” two years ago, and the Department of Labor’s Report on the Youth Labor Force was cited in last year’s Youth Truth article “Child Labor Laws : For Whose Benefit?”  Author and youth rights advocate Mike Males uses such sources even more extensively in his books and articles.   There’s some evidence that this type of data is also at risk.  An article at <http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/01/03/MN120712.DTL> reports that one such data source, the Mass Layoffs Statistics Program of the U.S. Labor Department, was discontinued at the end of 2002, reportedly due to lack of funding.  The article speculates that the funding was withdrawn largely because the data collected by the program made the economy look too bleak!  (For November 2002, the program’s final month of data collection, it reported 2150 mass layoffs affecting 240,028 workers.)   This lost data probably had little or no relationship to youth issues, but again, if this is how our government deals with numbers that make administration’s policies look bad, we shouldn’t be surprised to see other data-gathering programs discontinued as well.  Perhaps an Environmental Protection Agency program monitoring the effect of industrial pollutants on children’s health will suddenly disappear.  Maybe it will be data on rates of unintended pregnancies or sexually-transmitted diseases.  Maybe it will be statistics on children living in poverty, or without health insurance.   Maybe new data will be subjected to “prior restraint”—if information seems as if it could be used against the administration’s agenda, it may be ordered to remain unpublished.  There’s evidence that this, too, may already be happening: a Sept. issue of OMB Watcher at <http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/1061/1/150> revealed that a government report on children’s health had been routed to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for “review” prior to publication—an unprecedented action for this agency.   “Vanishing Act : the U.S. Government’s Disappearing Data,” an article at <http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1219-vanish.html> quotes Gary Bass of OMB Watch: “We are moving from a right-to-know to a need-to-know society.”  The article’s author, Marylaine Block responds, “It’s OUR information, and we can’t let them get away with deleting it.  We paid for it, and we need it, if we’re to have any hope of knowing what our government is doing.”  And the previously-mentioned article in Education Week quotes Gary Ruskin, director of the Congressional Accountability Project, as saying that to see government agencies using their web sites as “propaganda vehicles .... would make George Orwell smile.”