Search - 2 Results - thememoryhole and kick The New York Times, November 13, 2003 Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company The New York Times November 13, 2003, Thursday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section G; Page 7; Column 1; Circuits LENGTH: 913 words HEADLINE: Peeking Behind the Curtain of Secrecy BYLINE: By TOM McNICHOL BODY: IN George Orwell's "1984," documents deemed embarrassing to the State were tossed down a memory hole, a disposal chute in the Ministry of Truth that led to enormous furnaces. Taking a cue from the novel, Russ Kick, a journalist and author, established www.thememoryhole.org, a Web site dedicated to saving official documents from oblivion and posting them online. From his home in Tucson, Mr. Kick runs his own Ministry of Truth, chasing down government reports, Congressional testimony, court proceedings, corporate memos and media images that have been either suppressed or ignored. "I'm certainly not a journalist in the normal sense of the word," said Mr. Kick, who is 34. "I'm more of an information archaeologist. I'm trying to get the stuff that's either been purposely buried or just covered over by time." One of Mr. Kick's recent digs involved an internal report from June 2002 that harshly criticized the Justice Department's efforts toward diversity in employee hiring, promotion and retention. A version of the report was posted at the department's Web site last month with about half of the material in the 186-page study blacked out. But Mr. Kick discovered that the deletions were easy to restore electronically. Opening the document in Adobe Acrobat, a reader and editor for Portable Document Format, or PDF, Mr. Kick used the software's "Touch Up Object" tool to select the black bars covering the text. He then hit the delete button. The black bars disappeared, leaving just the text. "It was that simple," Mr. Kick said. "I was kind of surprised, but we are talking about a government bureaucracy, so I wasn't that surprised." The uncensored report, posted at The Memory Hole on Oct. 21, has been downloaded more than 340,000 times. Mr. Kick is not alone on the online paper trail; thesmokinggun.com has been posting quirky celebrity and court documents since April 1997 and is now owned by Court TV. Specialty sites like cryptome.org focus on documents related to privacy, cryptology and freedom of expression. Mr. Kick began his site in July 2002 and finances it himself. His chief source of income is writing and editing books; he recently published his seventh title, "50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know" (The Disinformation Company, 2003). His books are full of things "they" don't want you to know, although it is not always clear who "they" are or whether the statements are true. (Among the 50 things you are not supposed to know: the C.I.A. commits over 100,000 serious crimes per year; blood relatives of Hitler are living in the United States; an atomic bomb was dropped on North Carolina.) Mr. Kick is on firmer ground when he presents raw documentary evidence and lets readers draw their own conclusions, as he does at The Memory Hole. Among the site's top exhibits is the original text from the Web site of the Justice Department's Terrorism Information and Prevention System, known as Operation TIPS, in which American workers were encouraged to report unusual non-emergency events that they observed at work. Also to be found there is information on the poison ricin that was removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the full text of the joint Congressional report that criticized American intelligence for failing to plan for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the General Accounting Office's report on the energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Kick obtains many documents through requests under the Freedom of Information Act and posts a log of requests -- his own and those of others -- submitted to various federal agencies as a tool for other researchers. The site also has images seldom seen in the American media, including photos of soldiers and civilians who have been killed or maimed in the Iraq war. "My thought behind posting the photos was, that's what war really is," Mr. Kick said. "I think especially if you support the war, you have to look at what the effect of that is." Mr. Kick was born in Alabama and raised in Tennessee. His major at Tennessee Tech University was psychology, but he found he was more interested in reading crusading muckrakers like I.F. Stone. At the same time, he had an abiding interest in collecting obscure scraps of information: He was the kind of person people wanted on their Trivial Pursuit team. Years later, the same love of minutiae is evident at Mr. Kick's site, which contains nuggets like the full list of 599 cigarette additives identified in tobacco industry documents (vanilla extract, prune juice, vinegar, caramel color, and caffeine) and the number of soldiers who deserted the United States Army last year (4,021). Mr. Kick's audience is small -- the site is visited about 10,000 times a day -- but loyal. Some regular visitors send him small donations, which he uses to defray his document scanning costs. He currently has seven boxes of documents ready to go. "There's more of a market for this sort of information than the infotainment media realizes," Mr. Kick said. "There's a real hunger out there." The site's latest addition is a news release from the Department of Justice explaining why its diversity study was so heavily censored in the first place. According to the department's release, the revisions consisted of "pre-decisional deliberative information" -- a fine specimen of Newspeak captured just before it fluttered down the memory hole. http://www.nytimes.com GRAPHIC: Photo: UNCENSORED -- Russ Kick founded The Memory Hole to bring suppressed or ignored documents to light. (Photo by Chris Richards for The New York Times) LOAD-DATE: November 13, 2003 Source: News & Business > News > By Individual Publication > N > The New York Times Terms: thememoryhole and kick (Edit Search) View: Full Date/Time: Friday, December 12, 2003 - 4:09 PM EST About LexisNexis | Terms and Conditions Copyright © 2003 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.