Edit: as pointed out in a comment below, the official cause is coding error
Compare with the original, from a few weeks back
Half of section 8, governing Congressional power over the military is removed.
Section 9 had, among other things:
- Habeas Corpus the right to get a court hearing instead of arbitrary imprisonment
- a ban on foreign emoluments for the US officials (eg: payments from foreign governments)
Section 10 reserved foreign policy for the federal government instead of the states.
What possible ‘technical problem’ could do this? It’s not like the whole page has just gone offline. Specific sections of text are missing. And this is text that should never need updating.
They’re doing annotated sections. If the backend loads sections or parts of sections separately, a corrupt database might cause a problem like this. Also could load each article into a buffee…and article I was too long to fit, so it got truncated.
There is a lot more opportunity for technology to break in interesting ways than most people expect.
Its also sometimes helpful to give an adversary a face-saving way to back down, and a technical problem can be a way to do that.
Section 8 stops at the same point on two independent pages. Is it possible they’re both referencing the same source file? Maybe. But why would this ever get truncated? This isn’t some dynamic page that will have to buffer blocks of text of unknown length. It just doesn’t pass the smell test that the site suddenly can’t display correctly a block of text that hasn’t changed at all in over 200 years. And the sections that are deleted just happen to be those areas that Trump hates the most.
Regardless, we should screaming about this from the mountaintops. If there is one website on the federal government that you do not want to have displayed incorrectly, it’s the fucking Constitution.
I’ve seen over confident jr programmers think that they got it all right and deploy code without checking plenty of times.
Remember “DOGE” is also an effort to update all kinds of servers and codebases to like nodeJS or whatever current flavor of server the new programmers think is cool.
I’m not going to say it might not be intentional, but Hanlon’s razor is still my default for now. (Not with the climate and DHHS pages though, that shit is fascist data manipulation for sure).
The way I see it, a technical problem isn’t impossible. But considering the sections removed and the general political climate, I’d call it extremely unlikely
Also, it kind of doesn’t matter. Incompetence isn’t a defense for positions with the most responsibility and power.
Okay, so explain this: why can I archive various random pages on congress.gov, but when I try to look at archives for the 14th amendment, I get complaints that I can’t access it from ‘this site’ (archive.org)? I can view the live page, but I can’t archive it and then see the result. I’m also having issue archiving the current Article 1 page (as mentioned further under this post).
Edit: To me, the 14th amendment issue hints that: a) that page in particular requires cookies and b) it intentionally won’t load for/from archive.org – but this is not consistent for other pages so it seems extra fishy.
Stop it. You’re watching your rights being selectively erased so you can be deported while Trump gets private jets as bribes, stop it.
Stop what, making this post which alerted people to the problem?
They are coming up with ridiculously convoluted and unlikely excuses and downplaying the severity of it, this is an intentional assault on your freedoms and literal life in some cases, this isn’t a stupidly designed application that gets portions of text through separate calls and quietly ignores when some calls fail and presents the output as if its complete.
It’s possible that this combination of idiotic schema/application design and silent exception handling results in exactly the rights Trump is openly attacking being stripped out of the official .gov constitution document, but the odds are so incredible low why even hypothesize that? Why give them an out they didn’t even attempt themselves?
“Exactly the rights Trump is openly attacking” includes “providing and maintaining a navy”?
Your confirmation bias is showing.