COVER-UP at Google NEWS hides BUSH impeachment statistics

[L. Coyote]

Either that, or a lot of news sources have disappeared!!

Yesterday evening there were 2,172 news articles, based on six stories on the wires.
When you clicked Sorted by date with duplicates included, there were 1,957 distinct outlets carrying the story.

This morning, there are 103 news articles, so 2,069 have disappeared.
NOW, when you clicked Sorted by date with duplicates included, there are about 49 related articles.

This is blatant censorship of the news!!!

[Occulus]

1. I saw that higher number last night and I think you may be right n/t

[goodhue]

2. wow

[helderheid]

3. not good. Alternative media:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3419400

[Recursion]

4. Looks like the outlets syndicated from AP/Reuters

And then decided not to bite when the morning editors got in.

While I'm not one to slam Rep. Kucinich, there are better times in the news cycle to do this than when he did. Oh well.

[Trillo]

5. I've been looking for the 35 or 36 points read into the record.

I can't seem to find them. Not interested in a video, but rather the text read into the record. Thomas.loc.gov doesn't find it with a search.

It seems it didn't happen, yet, lots of people claimed CSpan covered it, but I missed that, and would prefer to read it anyway.

[csziggy]

28. DH & I watched Dennis Kucinich read it into the the House record

Here is a PDF of the full 35 Articles of Impeachment:

http://chun.afterdowningstreet.org/amomentoftruth.pdf

And here they are in plain text for ease of cut & paste:
http://erispress.com/Articles_of_Impeachment.txt

[fed-up]

6. k & R this needs a 5th rec please nt

[cascadiance]

7. I've noted suspicious indicators of political Google censorship in the past!

What appeared to be censorship of news articles on Sibel Edmonds for a month after Israeli spy Larry Franklin got arrested two years ago.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=39220

I think there was also complicity in reducing image search hits on version of DVD cover for "What A Girl Wants", which earlier had Amanda Bynes flashing a peace sign and later airbrushed to not have this so...

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,625918,00.html

Though there were sites that had the older and controversial cover showing up, they weren't showing up in google image search hits.



changed to:

[anigbrowl]

16. Right, because Google really wants to censor Amanda Bynes

Please, go read up on search engine technology and stuff like that. This is tinfoil-hat thinking at its worst. For that matter, I don't think Sibel Edmonds is all that credible either.

When I first read about her stories (about a year ago, if not longer), I was suspicious of whether there was really any substance to them. After reading every interview etc. I could get my hands on I came to the conclusion that she might be sincere, but her revelations don't amount to anything much. Now she's a darling of the conspiracy set, despite a complete failure to drop any block buster information.

It's not hard to do this you know. You can do it too. Make up a story about a UFO sighting - work on it for a while so it's got a good narrative, and make sure it includes a good conspiracy. For best results, waste a few days time and little money on a visit to a hospital emergency room (next time you have a minor accident, say) and by going to a police station. Then call up Art Bell and say you have been trying to get your story out but it's being covered up.

[cascadiance]

21. Oh, but they didn't air brush HER face out, it was the peace sign they airbrushed...

And if you think that that wasn't a political move, and the "missing" hits that looked to be coordinated with that censorship effort, you live in a bubble sir...

If you are saying that Sibel Edmonds isn't credible, then you are also claiming that senators Patrick Leahy and Chuck Grassley aren't credible, since they both spoke for her credibility, as well as the inspector general, which supported her side of the story in his report that she was fired for reasons she gave even though details weren't released. She also took a lie detector test too, that would have exposed a "fabrication".

If she were fabricating this, then there would be a slew of people deconstructing her allegations and providing one flaw to deflate her whole set of stories. But they aren't. Their strategy is to constantly trying to cover her up and silence her, at a rate that is very unprecedented. That to me is symbolic of a coverup not a fabrication.

People like you are why whistleblowers that are risking so much to come forward with what they know are getting trampled on now, and I think that's a sad commentary on our state of affairs now. And members of the NSWBC that Sibel Edmonds organized, which includes many people like Daniel Ellsberg, Colleen Rowley, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, etc. would all strongly disagree with you!

Look, I'm an engineer that works at a company that does search technology too, and directly in working on their mail technology which many people use here. I'm not stupid technologically. Software is software, and it can be controlled if someone writes it a certain way, and mistakes can also happen, which appeared to perhaps have happened in one of the links I provided in my previous post here.

The bottom line is, if there are symptoms of what appears to be censorship by a company that many people rely on to be someone that they TRUST as a gatekeeper as a part of doing business, then I think they as a public corporation have an obligation to explain why some of these symptoms occur and that there isn't something that is making their tools work potentially against the interests of the users for what might be political purposes.

[anigbrowl]

22. No, it's you who live in a bubble.

So the film studio put out an alternative, less political version of the poster. Well that's nothing unusual - they don't want ticket sales to be hurt by some avoidable political backlash, especially when it's a light entertainment movie to begin with. You have shown zero evidence for google being involved in any cover up. I did searches on google for 'amanda bynes what a girl wants poster' and got multiple examples of both poster versions on the same page.

It seems not to have occurred to you that when a poster is changed before or early in the launch of an ad campaign, then the newer version will be found on search engines in proportion to the degree it was advertised, because that'll be the most widely known and copied image. I also provided an explanation of why it was that the number of articles about Dennis Kucinich's impeachment attempt seemed to change so radically.

As for Sibel Edmonds, I may be wrong but I am just not convinced by her claims on the basis of what she says (as opposed to what other people say is important). She may be overstating the significance of what she knows, or she may not, but elements in her own remarks activated my sense of skepticism. I could, of course, be wrong about that.

BUT whether I am right or wrong, I stick to my point that the accusations of Google being part of a conspiracy to silence her are BS. Go to google and type in Sibel Edmonds. Her own website is the first thing that comes up! Where's the suppression? The second result is her Wikipedia article, which treats her allegations and legal journey in considerable depth. If there's this big conspiracy, how come it's so easy to find her version of the story?

[cascadiance]

23. Hey, when one did image searches at the time of the movie release, those images "disappeared"...

... later on they started showing up. Now, it does smack of CENSORSHIP. Now maybe it's somehow "normal", and the movie companies requested it and google helped them do this, which would mean that Google themselves didn't do it for political reasons themselves, but to say that image wasn't changed for political reasons is pretty silly.

I don't think Google as a company (with higher management involved) is actively "censoring" Sibel Edmonds. And in fact I do use it as my main tool to find news on her.

But the things I observed were subtle but there. And it seemed more than coincidental at the time. At the time that the "missing" search hits happened, there really was nothing concretely connecting Sibel Edmonds with Israeli spying, and therefore I or many others had no reason to LOOK for and invent this sort of thing. It doesn't take upper management necessarily to facilitate this. This definitely wasn't done on a broad scale and wouldn't be without them being stupid. But if for a brief period for example, someone in the government was afraid that when Larry Franklin was arrested, some other whistleblowers like Sibel Edmonds wouldn't suddenly connect the dots and put out some information they weren't capable of contending with, that they might go and ask for a favor from someone at google at the time to mask certain keywords from returning results (like "Sibel Edmonds" and perhaps others at the time, which I wasn't checking). You can call it conspiracy theory if you like, but to me it is a conspiracy theory to believe that suddenly cutting off any hits for over a month when it had a steady flow of hits every day or so, coupled with that weird alert email at the end of the year, as being "normal" errors. It might be a coincidence, but given that the coincidence theory seems so suspicious, I feel it deserves to be still being questioned where possible, and try to find other means to either corroborate or dismiss any problems surrounding it.

It has only been more recently that it appears that these Israeli spies and other Israeli entities were along with Turkish entities were potentially involved with leaking nuclear secrets and materials to Pakistan's AQ Kahn from elements of our country's administration that was subsequently provided by them to places like North Korea, Iran, and possibly Al Queda itself. The London Times saw that it was newsworthy enough to print those allegations.

George Bush has since been trying to get official authorization of providing nuclear technology to Turkey, which (like his trying to post-facto change the rules of domestic spying), is also trying to change the rules post-facto of whether it was proper to provide Turkey nuclear technology information. You can choose to ignore this, or that Valerie Plame's organization Brewster Jennings was investigating this nuclear secrets proliferation through Turkish entities, etc. when it was "shut down" by being exposed (and perhaps even earlier through Marc Grossman instead of Scooter Libby).

Some of this information may be incorrect or incorrectly attributed, etc. But the fact that glares out is that our mainstream media is being very silent about it, when other media around the world (the UK, France, Pakistan, etc.) are not.

If there is a conspiracy, they aren't stupid enough to do BLATANT censorship that everyone would spot and agree is wrong. They will do it subtly as they have been so far and try to cut off the news on these issues (like in a court case she had, they excused all the press, then excused her and her lawyers and talked to the government defendant's lawyers in secret, and then declared the trial over for "state secrets" reasons). That is blatantly not normal, but there isn't enough context to KNOW that it was a conspiracy by the government trying to conceal government coverups of criminal activity. They know that too, and know that as long as they can maintain that veneer of nebulousness, they will afford the mainstream media the excuse to not cover it.

It is much like the excuses made to not adequately cover the many unanswered questions of 9/11. You can buy into the government's official "conspiracy theory" if you like, but in my book, without an adequate investigation into what happened, they all are "conspiracy theories", as Charlie Sheen has noted.

[anigbrowl]

25. I'm sorry, your thinking is hopelessly woolly

Availability of film poster images on google are inevitably a factor of the degree to which the modified poster was used to promote the film. There is nothing censorious about a studio changing the marketing of a film because they're worried about a political backlash. Once again, this is light entertainment we're talking about, not a documentary. It's nothing but a marketing decision.

I appreciate your effort to convince me about Sibel Edmonds, but you seem to have missed the bit where I said I had made up my mind based on my own review of her output. You're not telling me anything I didn't hear already. I'm open to changing my mind about that, but I'll do so based on primary evidence, not someone's second-hand interpretation of it.

For the last time (as in, I have no plans to continue this argument) I see no evidence whatsoever that google is censoring the news. If you want to make that case in its own thread, I suggest you do so with facts, figures, and dates that can be verified by a third party.

[cascadiance]

26. I did give you a FACT that I was sent a "news alert" email erroneously from them

on January 2nd (first business day of the year) for the date in April that was right around the time when I observed those hits missing. I'm sorry that I didn't have the foreknowledge to do screen captures then of what was happening then. Like you, at that time I didn't think as much of it then other than being kind of curious annoyance as I did at the end of the year and receiving that "alert", and then moreso later when it became clearer that Sibel Edmonds' cases and allegations are directly related to the Israeli spy indictments. The allegations connections HAVE been established in recent news articles. We still need to hear testimony from relevant sources to establish them as fact. But the amount of info to do an investigation (and have testimony) clearly is there!

Whether you want to admit it or not, intentionally trying to make less available images on the web (either through going through google or other means) is a form of censorship. Now WHY they censor it (for business or political reasons) is open to debate. I would argue that the business reasons in this case ARE linked to political reasons (they felt they might politically offend some buyers). It wasn't that they were trying to hide important information of course, but they WERE censoring the availability of this image.

As I said, I don't have evidence for and not am alleging that Google officially at the top levels is doing this sort of censorship. I am saying that there is indicators in other areas that censorship could have been happening at some level of the company.

Now it could be some sort of optimization where initially a lot of additional web sites are grabbed, and then subtracted for various reasons (site reliability, google bomb site links, etc.), but I think if raw numbers do show radical decreases like they have been, it would be useful to know why they are decreasing like that. If the public puts a lot of trust in reliability of Google's fairness and lack of active control content-wise of their search links for political or other similar reasons, then it would be helpful for them to explain how a routine server process would have trimmed that many hits away.

If you apply needing a bullet proof case being made before you indict someone for a crime, or before you impeach someone, you'll never do so. When you get to that stage, you've gotten strong enough indicators that an investigation needs to be done for a criminal act. Similarly if you observe events that defy statistical randomness, then you're obligated to look into them further.

[bluesmail]

8. Blatant censorship n/t

[snot]

9. thank you -- we need to dog this. ALSO, I've msg'd the admins about

NOT using Google as DU's primary search engine. For another reason, but. We could use another that works just as well and had no history of bad behavior; e.g. Clusty. I'm sure theirs is just as easy to install as Google's.

My concerns about Google have to do with both censorship and with the records I understand they maintain on individuals' searches and keystrokes.

[madmusic]

10. True enough

When you type into the Google search bar just typing sets of the firewall. Wanna connect to Google?

Damn.

http://www.ixquick.com/ is a privacy search engine.

[Raksha]

14. Thank you for posting this.

I didn't know that just typing into the search window sets off a firewall when you use Google. That's because I don't HAVE a firewall.

But I've been having some VERY strange issues with AOL lately, and it's always after I've done a Google search, usually on some controversial BFEE topic like Project MK-ULTRA, which I first learned about on DU. I'm "allowed" to do my search and read the material unmolested.

But FOUR times now, when I have been in the middle of typing an e-mail to a friend about what I was just researching on Google, the AOL program has abruptly closed on me. I don't mean I simply get disconnected, although that happens pretty often too (I'm on dial-up).

What happens is that a white message window comes up telling me the program is closing--and then it does close. All the windows close, including my draft window, and I lose the e-mail I may have spent an hour writing.

If I simply got disconnected, the draft window would stay open and I'd be able to finish my e-mail. And always it's been the same friend too, and always when I'm saying something critical of the Bush administration. I guess this could be "coincidence," but it's enough to make anyone paranoid.

I was complaining about this to AOL Tech Support earlier tonight, and they said it could be a Google issue. But I clicked on your Ixquick link, and I see AOL isn't exactly squeaky-clean when it comes to users' privacy.

[weezy2736]

19. I feel your pain with the email problems.

One thing I started doing was typing all of my important emails in a text editor and just copy-paste it over to the Draft.

[EFerrari]

11. Both Google and Yahoo! did the same thing during the bombing

of Lebanon. They scrubbed stories about the Israeli peace movement. :shrug:

[chill_wind]

12. Well... one of the top advisors might be a loyal ex- Bush Reich neocon head-banger....!

It was rumored that he was hired as a lobbying exec:

Lookout, France! Google hires neo-con headbangerAxis of Do No Evil
By Andrew Orlowski → More by this author
Published Tuesday 24th May 2005 09:42 GMT

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The company that prides itself on "Doing No Evil" isn't taking any chances with its latest executive appointment. Dan Senor, the company's new Global Communications and Strategy VP, has a CV guaranteed to have Register columnist Otto Z Stern firing a celebratory fusillade skywards from his compound in New Mexico.

A former Senior Associate at the Carlyle Group, Senor was briefly Scott McLellan's deputy as White House spokesman before becoming head of the the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq's information department. The White House web site bills him as Senior Advisor to Presidential Envoy L. Paul Bremer III. Fox News hired Senor as a panelist in February. While in Iraq Senor showed his loyalty by going jogging in a Bush-Cheney '04 tracksuit.

Not everyone is impressed.

"I have come to associate his triangular, brush-cut head with an unceasing stream of bullshit. He's Ari Fleischer without the charm," writes one grump. "Hiring this guy is a repulsive move."


(snip)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/24/google_neocon/

A very big PS-- He is married to CNN's Campbell Brown. The BushReich rules!

Sourcewatch has this:

"In 2005, it was announced that Senor would be joining Google in a top lobbying capacity. However, the appointment fell through. Google told the Washington Post that "we were a little bit early to confirm" the appointment but indicated that he may be employed to provide "strategic advice."

Fuller neocon resume: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Dan_Senor

[chill_wind]

13. See also Der Office of Strategic Communications

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Strategic_Communications

[anigbrowl]

15. BULLSHIT

Did you look at the those 2000-odd news stories last night? A lot of them were completely irrelevant (eg ancient blog posts talking about the possibility of it happening someday) or referred to Kucinich's previous attempt to impeach Cheney. Search engines use adaptive algorithms, meaning the parameters for a search will change with more data in order to more accurately reflect the results.. If you believe google is censoring the news then you need to open a tinfoil hat store.

Hint: follow some other piece of breaking news with NO political dimension - I dunno, a sports story or something like that. Do frequent searches about it on google news as it breaks. You'll see the same sort of thing.

[progressoid]

17. Exactly.

I hate clicking on a Google "news" link only to be taken to some dipshit's blog.

[KharmaTrain]

18. Censorship Or Interest?

Other than DU, I haven't seen/heard many who are so twisted in knots about this. I sure haven't seen much on DKos or TPM or Open Left or Think Progress...that I think is more telling than the corporate media's usual duplicity.

The problem is few in the corporate media (and alternative media) think this is a non-issue. Say what you will, but this is part of what's driving things. There's also the problem of Kucinich being the messenger. The corporate media long ago relegated him to court jester status and his lack of follow through on his other resolutions has turned others off on this move as being more stagecraft than honest intent.

There's plenty of censorship in the media...if you haven't noticed. For example, the other day there was a report that linked Rove to Abramoff and more Oval Office visits than previously admitted...sure looks like there's more import in that news (especially when it comes to impeachment) but not only did the corporate media sleep through it, but so did many here.

Keep the eye on the ball...many will attempt to take advantage of the highly partisan election season to distract and distort. The biggest enemy we have isn't the GOOP, it's their corporate media enablers.

[nolabels]

20. I would guess those planted seeds took root a long time ago

Putting these rather obvious plants in places such as google is just a way to get those others in hire planted in those same companies with much deeper cover. This whole thing and this tread shows how the fruit of the investment is proving itself out

Take a clue, billions of dollars of operational money to make things happen what would you think they would be doing with it.

Being Googled
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=17950

Google Watch
http://www.google-watch.org/

[nilram]

24. for 'impeach', I get 1966 articles, 2497 sorted by date w/ dups included

For '+impeach +bush', I see 813 articles which turns into 979 when sorting by date with duplicates included.

:shrug:

[HughMoran]

27. Wow

This needs to be documented for several cases like this and exposed.