By Jessica Guynn
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
Steven Aftergood is a firm believer in the public's right to know. His life's work as a government-secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington is dedicated to making sure the government does not hide critical information.
Yet, like a slew of officials from government agencies and private organizations in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Aftergood has removed dozens of pages from his organization's site that he feared contained sensitive information and photographs that might be useful to terrorists.
"Our calculation shifted dramatically as a result of Sept. 11," he said. "And, regrettably, there are worse things in the world than government bureaucrats who are stingy with information."
But Aftergood overlooked one big detail: What goes up on the Web tends to stay up long after someone takes it down. The pages he deleted were still available for days afterward on Google.
To illustrate how information can linger on the Web, search-engine newsletter SearchDay plugged the phrase "U.S. intelligence facilities" into Google's search engine, and limited search results to the Federation of American Scientists Web site. The search yielded more than 4,500 results. Clicking on the links resulted in error messages because the pages had been removed, but clicking on a link to Google's cached copies displayed the pages.
Alerted by SearchDay, Google contacted Aftergood, and offered to remove the content. "We should have thought of it," Aftergood said.
The Google cache feature is one of the search engine's handiest. It allows access to snapshots of Web pages that Google takes as it crawls the Web. Web surfers can continue to access those pages through Google's cache even when they are removed until Google revisits the site and cleans up the dead links.
"The bottom line is that, when you put something on the Web, there's a good chance it's going to stay there whether you want it to be there or not," said Chris Sherman, who writes the SearchDay newsletter for SearchEngineWatch.com, a Web news site.
All search engines store copies of Web pages as they build vast databases, but Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., is the only one that makes those pages so directly and easily available to Web surfers.
This was a vital public service in the hours following the terrorist attacks. When access to news sites such as CNN.com was sharply curtailed by floods of people searching for the latest information, Google made copies of the news pages, and posted them on its site.
Connecting people and information quickly and efficiently has propelled Google's success. The search engine, with its trademark Spartan look and superior surfing capacity, nets 120 million searches every day. But the threat of more terrorist assaults on U.S. soil or on U.S. interests abroad prompted the search engine to abridge some of its content.
Google has approached government agencies and private organizations, offering to remove the pages. Among those sites that have had some or all of their content eliminated from Google's cache are the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has removed documents that detail specifications for energy facilities from its Web site, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which took its Web site off line to review "all material."
"This has been in large part a proactive effort on our part," but the search engine also has complied with requests to remove pages, Google spokeswoman Cindy McCaffrey said. She would not say which agencies or organizations made such requests.
"It's pretty simple: If the government is taking down a site, we will certainly go along with that decision, and remove it from our cache," she said.
Those requests may snowball as edgy corporations and other organizations seek to limit the amount of information available to the public. "A lot of Webmasters don't seem to be aware of the Google cache," Sherman said.
He noted that Google offered a number of ways to remove pages from its cache or prevent pages from being cached. "Google is acting very responsibly in this situation," he said.
This type of voluntary censorship marks a major shift for the Internet, where you usually can search and find just about anything. How far-reaching that shift could become as Americans struggle to adjust to living under the threat of terrorism troubles cyber- and government watchdogs.
"In war, the first casualty is the truth. The second casualty apparently is information," Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said.
Cohn also said she supported curbing information that in wartime could jeopardize American lives, but didn't want security concerns to unnecessarily clamp down on online freedom.
Gary Bass is another proponent of cyber-liberties. Next to his computer is a red, white and blue button that reads: "Information, the currency of democracy."
Bass is the executive director of Washington-based OMB Watch, which has lobbied the government for years for the free flow of information. Bass often uses Google to ferret out information, and recalled a recent meeting of members of the public interest community alarmed by the volume and kinds of information vanishing from the Internet. Bass said that one person joked: "Quick, go to Google, and get the cache."
Bass and others pointed out that stripping information from Web sites and Google may not prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists but may prevent the public from getting to it. The information is still out there on the Web for people who know how to find it. It may also have already been downloaded and stored on hard drives or on servers in foreign countries.
"The Internet is the current version of the extension of our grand democracy in many ways," Bass said. "To undermine that would greatly harm one of the core tenets of our democratic principles. Where we do it, we must do it very judiciously."