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:
Related Links from the Utne
Archive:
Comments? Story tips? Write a
letter to the editor
Like this? Want more?Subscribe to Utne
magazine
