Heading Into the Cave with a Torch

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Russ Kick, editor-at-large of Disinformation and founder of the Memory Hole, publishes top-secret government documents, exposes important stories, and frees information from the clutches of the Justice Department. Named after the incinerator in Orwell's 1984 that gobbles government information, the Memory Hole is a web site that publishes suppressed or disregarded Congressional documents, corporate memos and emails, police reports, 9/11 transcripts, and other importantly ignored news. In a recent interview with New York Times reporter Tom McNichol, Kick called himself an 'information archaeologist,' saying, 'I'm trying to get the stuff that's either been purposely buried or just covered over by time.'

In pursuing this goal Kick has been highly successful. A recent victory involved an internal report on the Justice Department's dismal record on diversity in hiring that had been posted on the Department's web site with nearly half of the 186 pages blacked out. Using Adobe Acrobat, Kick restored the entire document and published the highly embarrassing complete report on his web site, it has since been downloaded from The Memory Hole over 340,000 times.

Kick supports the web site through his own means, often through money from writing and editing books, the seventh of which -- 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know -- was recently published by Disinformation. As the editor-at-large of Disinformation, he has helped make it one of the most popular alternative media sites on the web, focused -- not surprisingly -- on the same sorts of subjects as Kick's own web site: exposing news and information overlooked or purposefully ignored by mainstream media. As author Pete Hamill writes, 'The full story will come out -- it always does -- because someone is heading into the cave with a torch.'
-- Joel Stonington

Related Links:

• The Memory Hole
• Disinformation
• Peeking Behind the Curtain of Secrecy

Related Links from the Utne Archive:

• An Antidote to the Spin Doctors($$)

Comments? Story tips? Write a letter to the editor

Like this? Want more?Subscribe to Utne magazine

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print