Conant to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

A copy of a March 18, 2002, email to the Reporters Committee:

Hello Ms. Dalglish [Lucy Dalglish, committee executive director],

Though no longer employed by a media organization, I remain a journalist in the sense that I write occasional web essays on free press issues.

Bush's extremism on secrecy is highlighted by his peculiar view of the constitution whereby he employs a de facto line item veto to void a CIA control law. That essay is at:

Bush fiat
http://angelfire.com/az3/nfold/bushfiat.html

By the way, I have found that both my geocities and angelfire web sites seem to get hit with an undue number of bugs. My angelfire site's page counters go up and down erratically, usually in unison. Complaints to Lycos some weeks back have produced no corrections, though in the past I would get an email from their support team saying that a particular bug was fixed.

This kind of annoyance seems to be part of the turf when writing about clandestine agencies. See my Geocities report:

MI6fray [taken down by Geocities].

Also, other special interest groups have the power to cause problems. See:

Pardon [also killed by Geocieties]

(By the way, on the last essay concerning Marc Rich and friends, no response has been received from the Washington Post ombudsman.)

Thanks for your attention.

Paul Conant

AntiPolygraph reports similar problem

On March 25, 2002, Cryptome.org listed Conant's letter.

On the same day, George W. Maschke of Antipolygraph.org sent Conant this email:

Dear Mr. Conant:

I recently found your website via a link at Cryptome.org and I thought I'd share a thought with regard to your hit counter problem. I, too, help run a website that is causing chagrin to officials in a number of three-letter agencies. We have had problems with our hit counters, too, but I have every reason to believe that the problem is with our server rather than any nefarious conduct on the government's part.

On occasion, the file in our server that keeps track of the number of hits becomes corrupted. Another thing that can happen, depending on one's browser, is that one ends up seeing a cached version of one's web page, which falsely creates the appearance that the hit count has gone down. I have personally experienced this on occasion.

I'm skeptical that anyone in the U.S. government is going to the trouble of toying with the hit counter on your site.

Best regards,

George W. Maschke

AntiPolygraph.org

On the same day, Conant replies:

Dear Mr. Maschke:

Thank you very much for taking the time for a thoughtful reply. By taking trouble to write, you help affirm the First Amendment right of unhindered communication, which we all have a duty to strive to uphold, in particular during a 'war on terror.'

I realize the hit counter issue is pretty foggy. However, it's just one of many hassles, computer-linked or not, that I run into as a journalist writing on 'controlled' subjects.

My feeling is that, if no response is forthcoming from Lycos even though previously its support team responded, then that silence is grounds for suspicion. But obviously clandestine forces are rarely so dumb as to leave themselves without a cover story.

Of course, I could cover this hassle like a regular news story, but it seems sufficient simply to draw attention to the fact that hassles come with the turf when discomfiting three-letter agencies.

Best regards,

Paul Conant

Remarks concerning this page on the original Angelfire site:

April 24, 2002 -- A random check of the counters sometime in the morning showed that, they were not going up and down in unison. However, the bug returned a few hours later.

On April 28, 2002, I see that various pages checked record an identical number of hits (364), including a page which is at a separate Angelfire address and which is not listed in the index.

On May 2, 2002, I note that a check from a public access terminal of someone else's Angelfire hit counter along with a check of my sites does not show an equal number of hits with those pages of mine that show equal numbers. That is, the bug seems to affect all my Angelfire web sites, but not someone else's Angelfire web site.

On July 5, 2002, I found an ambiguous posting on Angelfire's 'help' site which seemed to indicate Angelsfire's hit counter system was disabled. However, I never received an email alert to such a problem. Also, Angelfire says that a banner reading 'refuse' appears across the bottom of the page when the hit counter isn't functioning. I've never seen this banner. About two or three weeks ago, all the counters on my pages went to 0 and began to gradually rise. So now portal sites for several of my web pages have higher counts than do my pages.

On July 9, 2002, I added a Beseen Hit counter to this page, with a startup number of 300. I don't expect the rinky-dink to stop, only perhaps to change form.

Later on July 9, I attempted to install Beseen's guest book service, but the promised code is very slow in arriving.

On July 10, still no code, even after several tries, though it is supposed to arrive within minutes of signup. However, I did receive an email entitled 'Message from President Bush' from Jack Oliver of the Republican National Committee.

The unwanted filters are highly political, it seems.

On Aug. 1, I find that Beseen has shut down its free services and will discontinue the free hit counters by Aug. 19. [changed to Aug. 26]. Boy, the feds have all the luck!!!

On. Aug. 20, I tried to sign up for Microsoft's bcentral hit counter service. The registration process was blocked and I could not complete it, despite several attempts.

On Aug. 28, I installed www.digits.com's hit counter, using a low startup value of 250.

Nov. 10, 2011: The hit counter never got over 980.