April 02, 2008

An admission

I should have done this yesterday when Poligazette ran with the Google helps CIA story after the Times had blown the lid on it. I guess it's all going to come out over the next couple of days, so I may as well come clean.

Look guys, I'm not going to apologize. They came to me back in January/February time. I'd pretty much stopped blogging by then. Hadn't blogged much for about a year, wasn't able to. Too sick to work, too. I was in a pretty bad way.

They made it sound very attractive. They'd supply the content, fill out the archives a little and no one need be any the wiser. I wasn't so sure but hey, I needed the money. And all I had to do was keep my mouth shut.

I kept my side.

To tell you the truth, I'm surprised it wasn't noticed sooner. Check out what happens to the posting frequency here around the start of March - it just ramps up. There have been more posts to this blog in the last two months than I managed in two whole years. Add to that what they've done to the archives.

Most of the stuff has been written by some guy, looks ex-Air Force, writes like Stars and Stripes (these are his posts on the Stealth Fighter and the A-10 Warthog), with occasional input from some guy I never met. He covered opinion and foreign policy - this is one of his and this one here.

What were they planning? Really, I don't know. But what they were doing was rapidly adding content and steadily increasing the blog's profile. Don't ask me why. Like they say, I wasn't being paid to ask questions. But I can't imagine what influence they thought they were going to have.

Anyway, the game's up now.