Politics

The Internet Archive was allegedly hacked¹, and their crawler stopped updating conveniently prior to the election². Although the Wayback Machine was partially restored, most of the archive’s services were down for a considerable amount of time³. The Internet Archive has recently gone through a substantial amount of legal trouble, and some of their content has disappeared after they restored all their services. For an organization that has preserved so much of the old Internet, the recent events are quite troubling. They bring into question the entire integrity of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine.

Screenshots of articles and websites can easily be manipulated and faked. The debugging tools every web developer is familiar with can be used to manipulate articles and generate funny memes. That’s why archival sites such as Archive Today and Ghost Archive are so important as independent third parties that save snapshots of websites at given moments in time. The Internet Archive had one of the oldest indexes of web content, starting their crawling and archiving back in 1996⁴. However, after their recent alleged hack, people have noticed a considerable amount of content is missing.

The Erasure of History

After the return of the Wayback Machine, several years were missing from the archive of the Twitter blog:

An essay on meta narratives by Jay Dyer was also removed:

This may have been a copyright removal due to the Internet Archive’s recent loss in court⁵ to publishers over their “National Emergency Library⁶.” The Internet Archive was destined to lose this case, as their legal defense involved inventing new insane interpretations of fair use and copyright law⁷.

Censoring Sandy Hook

I still had an open tab in a web browser for Jim Fetzer’s book Nobody Died at Sandy Hook from before the Internet Archive went down. Upon returning to the tab, it refreshed, and I was presented with the following message. This book had been removed from the archive within the past two months.

The removal of this book is particularly concerning since it coincides with other current events. Alex Jones’s InfoWars was sold to The Onion satire newspaper in a bankruptcy auction⁸. This bankruptcy auction was needed in order to pay off defamation actions from two different civil cases against Alex Jones where the judges denied him a jury trial, issued summary judgment, denied the submission of exculpatory evidence, and removed the ability of his lawyers to use constitutional 1st Amendment defenses.

The entire bankruptcy process is quite unusual, as Alex Jones is still appealing both of the civil decisions. It turns out the auction was conducted privately, unethically, and was financed using credit from the judgments against him⁹. The bankruptcy judge was not comfortable with the situation¹⁰¹¹ and blocked the auction¹².

I’m not as concerned with Alex Jones’s situation, as I still question his connections, and the connections of his family members, to the CIA¹³¹⁴. I am more concerned with Jim Fetzer’s case, where he was also denied a jury trial (the judge issued summary judgment) and the plaintiff was awarded $450k¹⁵. Fetzer has no recourse, as his petition for certiorari to The Supreme Court of the United States was denied on October 3, 2022¹⁶.

Furthermore, the website SandyHooked.net, which had been up since at least 2021¹⁷, was removed within the last few months¹⁸. It now redirects to the default page of the hosting provider, Wix. Whether the owners canceled their service, or Wix censored the site, is unknown.

It is very odd that this content, which has been up for years, was suddenly taken down within the same month. I noticed both of the examples above had been removed prior to The Onion’s publicity stunt. It could be coincidental, but in the past few years I have witnessed similar situations where a celebrity gossip website, a controversial blog, and an up-and-coming social media site were all dropped simultaneously by multiple big and small hosting providers. It’s a strong sign of coordinated efforts and collusion for censorship within the tech industry.

Missing Wikileaks

I started looking at other things I had either downloaded from the Internet Archive, or were still in my web browser’s history. I haven’t archived anywhere near as much from the Internet Archive as I had from YouTube, but I still found some of the items I have are now scrubbed. Among them are the 2017 Year Zero (Vault7) Wikileaks:

After Julian Assange’s plea deal, the Hillary Clinton/DNC leaked e-mails became inaccessible on Wikileaks¹⁹. Some assumed removing the DNC e-mails were part of his plea agreement²⁰. However, there is no mention of these documents in his plea agreement²¹, the e-mails are currently available²², and mainstream sources claim they were likely inaccessible due to age and maintenance issues on the Wikileaks website²³.

The Vault 7 leaks still seem to be on the official Wikileaks website as well, so I’m not sure why the Internet Archive would remove their own copy. Still, it’s another example of why archiving documents is important, because they could easily become inaccessible.

Archive the Archivist

I haven’t downloaded a lot of material from the Internet Archive, and I’m a bit surprised at how much controversial content I’ve downloaded is still up. Their current court losses and rising legal fines are so substantial, there is no way they could possibly pay them and keep their doors open⁵ without major assistance.

I wonder if their recent legal situation has led them to make certain compromises in allowing the removal of content or purposes of censorship. Others have speculated the recent hack itself is highly suspicious²⁴. For years, the Internet Archive has been an essential tool for people in the alternative media for research into the past. Both the Wayback Machine, and various other archival sites on the Internet, have been instrumental in discovering media manipulation and fighting censorship.

In the coming year, I’m sure we’ll see more reports on content that has disappeared from the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. But the much larger fear is the Internet Archive going a step further; altering content in its index, in order to mislead people and rewrite history²⁵. I know that seems farfetched and extreme, but given the state of the tech industry, search engines and censorship, it is well within the realm of possibility.