Leaks: Russ Kick's Memory Hole... En Memorium Archivus

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http://russkick.com/about/
http://thememoryhole2.org/
https://www.muckrock.com/accounts/profile/russkick/
https://archive.org/details/thememoryhole/
https://altgov2.org/counterspy/


The Memory Hole 2

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"Russ Kick is good at saving stuff that the government wants hidden."

                                    --Rachel Maddow [video link]

The Memory Hole 2 - run by writer and anthologist Russ Kick - saves
important documents from oblivion. Its predecessor, The Memory Hole
(2002-2009), posted hundreds of documents, many of which will be
reposted on the new site. Some of the highlights:

* Most famously, obtaining and posting Pentagon-banned photos of
flag-draped coffins of the fallen coming back from Iraq and
Afghanistan. This led to worldwide front-page coverage, heavy rotation
on the 24-hour news channels, and a statement from the Pentagon that
the release had been "a mistake" and would never happen again.

* Removing the redactions from an embarrassing Justice Department
report on diversity among its legal workforce, then posting it with
the previously censored portions highlighted in yellow. This led to a
front-page story in the New York Times.

* Obtaining and posting the full, uncut footage of President George W.
Bush in that Florida classroom during the 9/11 attacks. We posted it
for the first time, exactly one year before Michael Moore used it in
Fahrenheit 9/11, claiming that his was the first public airing of the
full footage. At that point, it had been viewed well over 100,000
times on The Memory Hole.

* Scanning and posting asset-forfeiture manuals that the Justice
Department ordered libraries to destroy, saying they had been
mistakenly released. Most libraries complied.

* The entire release of the 9/11 firefighter, EMT, and Port Authority
radio dispatches, which had appeared only in fragments online.

* The FBI's entire file on Martin Luther King, Jr. (all 16,000+ pages of it).

* The hopelessly rare Kerry hearing transcripts on government
cooperation in the global drug trade.

* All the images from Tommy Chong's "Chong Glass" website, which was
pulled down by the Drug Enforcement Administration after they arrested
him for selling drug paraphernalia.

* Lots of previously unposted documents on the US biological and
chemical warfare program.

* 1,200 pages of previously unavailable reports from the State
Department's "Future of Iraq" project.

* Deleted websites of the notorious Information Awareness Office, the
Air Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department's Office of
Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance and Training, as well
as deleted portions of the websites of the Department of Education,
the Texas Department of Corrections, and the FDA.

* The Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Lost Workday
Injury and Illness Database, which identified tens of thousands of
companies by name. OSHA fought in court for two years to keep this
database secret.

* Dozens of on-the-ground photos of the 1979 takeover of the American
embassy in Iran. These photos had previously not been seen outside of
Iran.

* Dozens of previously unseen internal forms used by the NSA and the IRS.

* Unreleased FBI maps of the Columbine massacre.

* Sensitive documents from tobacco, pharmaceutical, and chemical corporations.

The Memory Hole 2 achieves its mission in several ways:

* Discovering what documents the US government has pulled offline,
recovering them, and reposting them here. In this way, The Memory Hole
2 is the reverse of its namesake in George Orwell's 1984, in which
official documents that were no longer convenient for the
powers-that-be were sent to a furnace through a hole in the wall.

* Digitizing and posting important documents that previously existed
only on paper.

* Filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents
across the federal government (including Cabinet-level departments,
regulatory agencies, intelligence agencies, and the military), then
posting the results. I also sometimes file at the state and local
levels, as well as with governments outside the US.

* Posting documents obtained by other researchers.

* Proactively mirroring important documents that seem in danger of
being pulled offline.

* Posting documents that are available but are languishing in
obscurity. This may include documents buried in huge search-only
archives (not browsable), forgotten news reports, startling passages
from books, court decisions, etc.

* Converting documents from inconvenient or cumbersome formats into
convenient ones. This might include taking hundreds of one-page and
two-page PDF files and merging them into a single document, or making
a photo gallery out of images in scattered locations.

* I do some behind-the-scenes work by downloading gigabytes' worth of
documents from government websites that use dirty tricks to block
automatic archiving and caching, As long as the documents stay on the
official sites, I may not post them, but if they ever go missing, I
have copies.
Russ Kick, Proprietor

Please let me know if you notice the disappearance of government
documents, webpages, or websites.
If you see something, say something!

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