I see your point, but there’s a stark difference. This is new raw data, not 14-year old data. Easier to contain and massage before it has a chance to get out.
There was a tweet on NBC from an ISIS source hashtagged #AmericaBurning where they praise the “young lions” who escaped and so forth. That has some probative value I think.
“Easier to contain and massage before it has a chance to get out.”
In 1984 the “memory hole” was a slot in a metal wall, something like an old-fashioned mail slot. Orwell wrote that you could feel the warm air drafting up from the furnace when it was opened in order to insert some scrap of paper that the Ministry of Truth employee wanted destroyed forever. There might have been a few hundred memory holes in minitru.
There are hundreds of millions of electronic `memory holes’ in 2015. So it’s the analog versus electronic debate.
My respectfully reply is that, like George Costanza’s parents, once a piece of information is out there—like the true identity of the murderers here—it’s out there.
Destroying, concealing it is like trying to make a done bun undone, like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, attempting to catch a Chewbacca fart and paint it green.