technologylegacies

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=358645

CERTIFIGATE
Online Supreme Court opinions scrubbed in 2008 election runup
1875 court definition of eligibility deleted from 25 cases at Justia.com
Posted: October 23, 2011 5:30 pm Eastern
By Bob Unruh © 2011 WND

*** begin quote ***

“This tampering happened at Justia.com. That is a fact. The questions which need to be answered now are who ordered it and who carried out the subversive plot,” he wrote.

Dianna Cotter wrote in the Portland Civil Rights Examiner: “This was done in these specific cases in order to prevent their being found by Internet researchers long before anyone had even begun to look for them, even before Obama would win the Democratic nomination at the DNC Convention in Denver, Colo., in August ’08. This is premeditation and intent to deceive.”

She noted that attorneys working on arguments always would return to the originals from the Supreme Court, “but 99.99 percent of the population has no access to dusty law texts or expensive legal research services such as Lexis and Westlaw.

“The manipulation at Justia.com diluted the importance of Minor by killing the citations in Supreme Court cases spanning over 100 years. Since Google most often returns Justia.com’s version of the case being searched for as the first or second hit, Justia’s version of Supreme Court opinions are most influential in the blogosphere’s forums and comments. Erasing those citations and text on the Internet literally erases the importance of Minor and its precedents to millions of Americans otherwise unlikely to ever step into physical Law Library,” she wrote.

*** end quote ***

Regardless of whatever side you’re on in the debates, this is an interesting issue from a “technology legacies” pov.

How does one determine that data has not been tampered with?

One would expect that, for example, a financial transaction would have a checksum somewhere. “Machines” do make mistakes.

So to, non-financial data can have great impact.

At the very least, there should be an indelible journal attached to information that shows what changed.

Here to is an example of depending up a secondary or tertiary source.

I’m sure this is goign to be discussed with Google. As the “referee” of credibility, by serving up manipulated data, Google’s credibility is hurt.

We’ve seen this issue in Wikipedia “battling updates”, and I’d opine, there will be more of this in the future.

# – # – # – # – # 2011-Oct-23 @ 21:40