I don't usually blog the political stuff (unless some pinhead in government is doing the bidding of Big Content) but this piece about the Bush administration's propensity to rewrite history to suit its needs got me thinking.
In this case, the Department of Health and Human Services ("Human Services" is an creepy title, by the way) is taking flak for having altered a report to put a much more positive spin on minority healthcare. The original report called the fact that minorities tend to receive less, and lower-quality, healthcare a "national problem." The revised draft...not so much. The edits were rationalized thusly by an HHS spinhead:
"That's just the way [HHS] Secretary Thompson wants to create change," said Karen Migdail, a spokeswoman at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the HHS unit that drafted the report. "The idea is not to say, 'We failed, we failed, we failed,' but to say, 'We improved, we improved, we improved.' "A display of Olympic-calibre doublethink gymnastics, yet so honestly stated you almost think she believes it. Scary.
Anyway, what got me thinking about this was that had the government employed some kind of DRM, especially one tied-into proprietary PC hardware, these changes might have remained secret. The earlier drafts could have been "eyes-only" for inside HHS, and any stray copies could have been time-bombed.
In their efforts to kowtow to Big Content, PC makers like HP (given Carly Fiorina's statements at CES) are trying to turn the computer into a black box over which you have no control. It would allow corporations or government to reach back and erase their most embarassing moments, rewriting history.
