Funny, I heard a similar thing from someone who had access to insiders in that group, except it was explained something like: someone inside the search or spam

Funny, I heard a similar thing from someone who had access to insiders in that group, except it was explained something like: someone inside the search or spam team and put a downrank signal on a site with their name on it - and only if the person who put their name on it was consulted, could it be removed. No way to prove that's true, or an issue with one of my sites, however I think it would be really evil for them to do something like that and still accept disavow lists from us. IT would also be impossible to fix a site if Matt Cutts had put his name as a downrank blocker on a site and he was no longer at the company and able to take his block off of one - of if his pet sites we assigned to someone else who had no interest in de-penalizing a site that had fixed it's issues and such. To think of all the hours we have spent creating and uploading disavow lists over the years with the google promise it could help - only to find out there may be a hidden curse that is impossible to remove, I mean, it's unfair and they set people up to waste even more time trying to please google knowing that it will never happen. I always wondered if it's some things like this that would of caused mr Cutts to walk away from google as it seemed that they decided to take the penalties too far. Just a gut feeling, I don't expect there to ever be proof of anything like that, and I have given up on big G changing for the better.