The Ministry of Truth […] was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering,
the three slogans of the Party:
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
So was entered into our collective consciousness one of the coldest, most brutal images representing the work envisioned by Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, in his masterpiece, 1984. It represents when an entity becomes so persuasive, so absolute in its control over the media that it can change the records of history itself. It can reinvent everything, to create the truth it wants. While many have taken it as a warning, others take it as a model.
In the corner of Twitter lies Congress Edits, an automated tool which reports every time someone from a congressional IP address edits a page on Wikipedia. Usually it is simple things, like adding congressional bills to pages which reference them, or claims that Donald Rumsfeld is an alien. But, in the wake of the vomit-inducing revelations of widespread torture by the CIA, someone in congress decided on taking a page out of Orwell, and began to systematically erase the mention of torture from the wikipedia page.
Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/gCbKRlBvdw
— congress-edits (@congressedits) December 10, 2014
Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture Wikipedia article edited anonymously from US Senate http://t.co/Bj4q8Naed1 — congress-edits (@congressedits) December 9, 2014
Whenever the phrase “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” appeared, they would strip away that such techniques are a euphemism for torture, with the appropriate Wikipedia link. Small, but deceitful none the less. Why they did it, or who it was, nobody knows.
Wikipedia relies upon self-policing of entries, with honest exchanges of information. Attempts to censor even unpopular pages are met with stiff resistance. A private citizen trying this is bad enough. For someone in government? No, the sheer audacity stands against the foundation of this country.
This address has been quite active on Wikipedia, including editing CongressEdit’s own Wikipedia entry in some form of self-gratifying prank. Other edits include removing the classification of the White House Information Group as propaganda, and demanding that criticism of the movie Lone Survivor be removed, along with claiming that “Danny is a big fan of his” in a Wikipedia page on Philip Danforth Armour. In short, the IP address has been used, and abused, for awhile now.
No, the CIA report is not the most flattering, but Wikipedia is not a popularity contest. It is an attempt at crowdsourcing accurate information. Attempting to hide the bits you don’t want to remember only will bring them out for people to witness. Whomever you are, IP# 156.33.241.11, the world knows your number, and they are watching.
The NSA and CIA still have copies of the data deleted that they will keep for as long as their global surveillance and storage systems exist.
http://jimstonefreelance.com/ciaappreciationpage.html