By Sebastián LacunzaEditor-in-Chief
In a single afternoon, the government suddenly made articles from the Infojus news website vanish
Until not so long ago, authoritarian governments or dictatorships that sought to censor a book or the press appealed to methods that required daring but which could prove to be effective. They could choose to send a newspaper’s entire archive to the most humid basement or risk the disgrace of burning books in a public square. If with some effort the censor was able to ensnare all of the copies in circulation and control the presses, the sought-after final solution was in reach or at least the unwanted content was reduced to gloomy attics and small-scale distribution such as the Agencia de Noticias Clandestina during the last dictatorship that cost its director Rodolfo Walsh his life.
In the digital era, archives and libraries began to grow into infinity. If before the task of accessing an archive or distributing a prohibited text meant putting one’s body on the line, now the Internet makes instant access and redistribution easy. Not even the state apparatus of the United States and its allies is enough to restrain the networks of volunteers like WikiLeaks or whistle-blowing spies like Edward Snowden, even if plenty of illegal activity is going on against them.
An essential element of journalism consists in comparing people with their pasts and discovering their forbidden relationships. In the pre-Internet era, it could take years. For example, it took seven years to discover former Supreme Court justice Rodolfo Barra’s membership in anti-Semitic youth groups after his protector Carlos Menem assumed the presidency in 1989. In contrast, Culture Minister Pablo Avelluto only had hours before he had to explain his tweets favouring military dictatorships of the past (he explained it was only a joke).
Google, YouTube and social media have become a sword of Damocles for public figures. In the name of censorship with good intentions, Let’s Change officials in the Justice Ministry dared to erase the archives of the Infojus digital news agency, which was created in 2011 to report on judicial, crime and human rights issues. Justice officials say that their act of censorship had no political intent, which contrasts with the fact that many of the articles that have disappeared from the iInternet referred to members and associates of the current government.
The random sweep of the Infojus articles took place in a single summer afternoon. Herein lies another facet of the new forms of censorship. If making entire editions of books or newspapers required days of persecution and sophisticated logistics to collect all of the volumes in a square and set them on fire, today a censor can sit in front of a computer, search for keywords, and simply click.
Years of work can disappear in a matter of seconds.
But the story doesn’t simply end there. Not even the most skilled of IT specialists will ever be entirely sure that the deletion is total and everlasting. In the same way that in 1978 a librarian of a Buenos Aires school could hide in the most obscure spots the blacklisted The Little Prince, today censors are faced with the indelible traces of the internet that once rescued return to their path toward the afterlife.
@sebalacunza