Agendas vanish from Obama's transition Web site
Caption: An excerpt from President-Elect Barack Obama's now-deleted technology agenda on Change.gov.
Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.
Now they're gone.
The "agenda" Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a "comprehensive and detailed agenda" that will "bring about the kind of change America needs," with the individual pages deleted entirely.
A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of Microsoft's Live Search is far more detailed, promising to convene a nuclear terrorism summit, declare the Internet "a strategic asset," and establish a $2 billion fund to "counter al-Qaeda propaganda." Those happen to be identical to the promises that candidate Obama made earlier this year; they have not been deleted from the campaign Web site.
I've posted mirror images of the vanished homeland security section, the technology section, and the newsroom section listing the different topics on the right side of the page.
Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's transition communications director, would not say what was going on or whether the deletion meant that some of the campaign promises would be dropped. He sent CNET News a one-line e-mail message saying: "That section of the Web site is being retooled."
This isn't the first time that vanishing or altered documents on a presidential Web site have been noticed: President Bush got some unwelcome attention for this last year. The White House's Web team also rewrote the May 2003 caption showing Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier after the Iraq occupation proved more problematic than expected (see before and after).
The ephemeral nature of Web publishing does raise some serious issues: if a president-elect circulates a physical press release promising to do something, and then changes his mind, there's a paper trail. That doesn't exist when files are added to a Web site and then quietly removed over a weekend.
The Library of Congress and other institutions, including the California Digital Library and the Government Printing Office, are trying to remedy this by doing an "end of term" crawl. That means they're regularly crawling and archiving all .gov domains that are considered "government sites," including Change.gov. The crawl started in September and will continue through February 2009.
The project has a varying crawl schedule, so it may not have collected the agenda pages on Change.gov, Abbie Grotke, a digital media project coordinator on the Web capture team in the Library of Congress' office of strategic initiatives, said on Monday.
The Change.gov site has been added to the list of sites to be crawled as part of the Library's Election Archives project--a separate effort. Gina Jones, also part of the Library's office of strategic initiatives, said that since it's a new site, it hasn't been collected yet.
CNET News' Stephanie Condon contributed to this report.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
Our patent office is our industrial policy ... The status who should not cap the pay-out for innovation - even changes to how the pols work with constituencies ...
Wes
http://www.friendfeed.com/digitalshaman
You can run, but you cannot hide ;)
/P
Yeah, look out for this "Charlatan" as he makes you eat your words!!! Tee hee!!!
It was under a Republican president's non-watchful/non-regulatory eye that this economic crisis developed. And what has this resulted in? REDISTRIBUTION of taxpayers' money to Wall Street!
Oh yeah, speaking of disappearing data, what happened to all that White House email, eh?
No kidding. I wonder what fools people must be sometimes. I can't believe people are already trying to find anything (and this is a real reflection of that), anything to cast doubt before he is even sworn in.
In the mean time, while in the middle of what could be historically the worst situation since the Great Depression, these idiots, complete and utter fools, express desire to want more of the same from the same people who actually brought it to us. I remember the interviews from Generals, Scholars, and yes, Activist Actors who predicted the outcome of some of the decisions when asked about areas they had interest in.
Generals were 'Retired', Agents were 'Retired', and in on very, very high profile case exposed. If you didn't agree, someone who would toe the party line (thus not put their duty first) was replaced. Six, or seven years ago McCain was one of Bush's detractors, then, about 2-4 years ago (can't recall) he suddenly was becoming his cheerleader. The American public is not as dumb as many would like to think.
Yea, lets give the bailout money to what, Wallstreet, a handful of companies. How in the hell does that help Tom, Dick, Harry, Susan, Lisa, and Jane?! Come on, give me some more of that sweet double-talk. Nothing is going to change except this, and from what I've heard, this is what exactly what happened - Raises for execs, vacations, and parties. Meanwhile, Tom, Dick, Harry, Susan, Lisa, and Jane are still ---cked!!!
Umm..the Republicans were the ones trying to reform the 2 "F"s but the democrats stopped them in 2004-2005. Hell, even Bush called for reform of those two giants in 2003. Obama received the 2nd highest lobbying money from them and his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was in charge of Freddie Mac while it was screwed up our economy. Is this the change we can believe in? Putting his Chicago cronies who helped create our economic mess in charge of his administration?
Besides, Obama supported the bailout plan, so he helped redistribute the wealth to Wall Street.
The real cause of the crisis was the rampant "securitization" of loans. Bad loans were packaged up as bonds or some other financial instrument and sold to unsuspecting investors. Pretty soon everyone had a stake in the bad loans. If the bad loans were confined to the lender then this may have isolated the risky loan from the greater financial community but Wall Street was making too much money off the practice. And the government pretty much stayed out of the way of Wall Street until it was too late.
Now you know how we people who voted for Obama feel because of the promises he made on his agenda and once he won the election, they mysteriously vanished.
He's the president of the United States now, protocols didn't vanish overnight. Without even trying I can tell you that the review process alone will cause changes like that. What will be interesting to see, is if the President of the US will have an official site that provides information.
you people think you are super geniuses or something, you actually think they were just slipping and forgot to take it off the campaign website
every idiot who knows how to search with google thinks they are some sort of super spy now
truth is you have people campaigning to be president who have never been president before so they are both making alot of claims on changes that they may really want to make but they dont really know if they can
once they become president that all changes and they have to retool their strategy (and websites accordingly)
doesnt mean they are suddenly reversing all their policies
>Subtraction
Sometimes retconned alterations are so drastic as to render prior stories untenable. Many of the retcons introduced in Crisis on Infinite Earths and DC's later Zero Hour were specifically intended to wipe the slate clean, and permit an entirely new history to be written for the characters. This is commonly referred to as a reboot. This is often very unpopular, upsetting fans of the material that has been removed from continuity.
Unpopular or embarrassing stories are sometimes later ignored by publishers, never referred to again, and effectively erased from a series' continuity, an example of which is the Stargate SG-1 episode "Hathor". They may publish stories that contradict the previous story or explicitly establish that it "never happened", for example by claiming that events in a previous installation were "just a dream". Likewise, an unpopular retcon may even be re-retconned away, as happened with John Byrne's Spider-Man: Chapter One.
An example of subtraction can be found in Disney's The Lion King series. After the success of the first movie, Disney released a group of books titled The Lion King: Six New Adventures in which Simba is said to have a son named Kopa. It is also mentioned in the storybook version of the film that he has a son. However, in the film sequel The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, Simba only has a daughter named Kiara. Kopa is non-existent and no mention is made of him. Kiara also has a different coloring and more feminine features than the cub shown at the end of the first movie. <
"Change"
- by rico567 November 12, 2008 12:51 PM PST
- Great expectations doesn't begin to cover this situation. The world has been promised, and the world is spiralling into recession. Pulling those web pages is just the first step in reneging on much of what has been said. Fasten your seat belts......
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