Errr . . . you don’t have it quite right.

The quote came up in the first place because people, finding information they did not have access to, or was alluded to but deleted, found ways to find that information again.

It wasn’t people wanting to be heard, it was people curious about what they weren’t allowed to know. The internet scene was ‘mildly’ different at the time, and since the effort required to spread such info where it might want to be known is much, much less now, (if you have a single bot, it’s practically zero . . .), it’s much less evident that this is being done today.

Back then, to get info out, you would go to a courier service. A group of people who would stay up all night, logging onto different BBS’s, spreading the word.

But before that, you might get the info by undeleting a comment remotely through BBS software, by seeing it earlier and saving a copy, by going to a lot of BBS’s and asking if anyone had done exactly that, by cracking the OP’s password, logging in as him and seeing the message that was removed, asking the OP what had been deleted, (maybe offering him something in return), etc. etc.

But before that, you spent hours logging onto and reading BBS’s in the first place.

Now that we can do all this in, at worst, a few minutes with the click of a button, and there are so many people out there viewing each page, and that there are so many tools out there which save pages, it is absolutely impossible to get rid of juicy information on the internet unless everyone agrees to get rid of it. And even then, you have to find every copy . . . so getting rid of it on the internet means it probably still exists on a few hard drives out there.

Of course, finding information to look at is still the hardest part, as with back then, because we have much more to filer through now, even if our internet connections are 20,000-1,000,000 times faster.