Tag Archives: internet-archive

The Coolest Thing on the Internet Is Moving to Canada

Mother Jones

A year ago, Donald Trump said he would consider closing off parts of the internet.

“We’re losing a lot of people because of the internet, and we have to do something,” he told a crowd while campaigning at the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina. “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people…about, maybe in certain areas, closing the internet up in some way. Somebody will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech! Freedom of speech! These are foolish people…We’ve got to do something with the internet.”

A week later, during the CNN Republican presidential debate, Wolf Blitzer asked Trump if “closing the internet” might put the United States “in line with China and North Korea”—two countries known to censor the online world. Trump responded that groups like ISIS are using the web to take our “young impressionable youth” and that he “sure as hell doesn’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our internet.”

So now, as Trump prepares to take office, a number of internet-freedom activists are worried he may make good on these campaign promises. They include Brewster Kahle, the founder of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive, one of the biggest online libraries in the world that curates 279 billion web pages, 2.9 million films and videos, 3.1 million recordings, and much more. Part of the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine, a search engine for past incarnations of web pages, some of which are no longer accessible. In a FAQ posted to the Internet Archive blog last weekend, Kahle wrote that the Internet Archive had been planning a partial backup in Canada. But Trump’s statements on the campaign trail and his election as president “ramped us into higher gear, moving us further and faster than we would have. The election led us to think bigger.”

“On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change,” Kahle wrote in a statement on November 29. “It was a firm reminder that institutions like ours, built for the long-term, need to design for change…It means preparing for a Web that may face greater restrictions.”

In an interview with Mother Jones, Kahle said that after the election, his staff went through the archives to see what Trump had said about the internet and freedom of speech. They found several instances of troubling talk from Trump in which he called for restricting parts of the internet and attacked the press for reporting on his behavior. When your business is to preserve a record of the internet as a historical record, a president who might restrict it is an existential threat.

“At this point it seemed prudent to at least take him at his word,” Kahle told Mother Jones. “If something goes down, and he said this was what he was going to do, shame on us.”

So instead of building out a partial backup of the entire Internet Archive in Canada, as they had originally planned, Kahle and his team are now moving forward with a full duplication of their work based in Canada. The group already has partial backups in Alexandria, Egypt, and Amsterdam, but Kahle says the $5 million Canadian project is designed to be not just a backup, but “another node in an international library system.”

In recent segment on The Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow described the Internet Archive as an invaluable tool for researchers, journalists, and everybody who wants to preserve history with reports and data that are only accessible through the Wayback Machine. Vice President-elect Mike Pence’s first congressional campaign platform document—that included a call for the government to shift AIDS research funding and put it toward curing people from being gay—can no longer be found through a Google search. Trump’s use of a government presidential transition web page to showcase his properties around the world was taken down shortly after it appeared but can still be accessed through the Wayback Machine.

Kahle said another example was a press release that came out during the George W. Bush administration after the famous speech he delivered under the “Mission Accomplished” banner, announcing that all combat operations in Iraq had ended. That release was soon amended before being pulled down altogether. But the Wayback Machine preserved the controversial moment for history.

“People remember that particular event,” Kahle said. “Having it switch from ‘Yeah, we’re done here,’ to ‘Well, we’re still there,’ and ‘Let’s not talk about that anymore,’ all happening with that one press release from WhiteHouse.gov I think is kind of a useful lesson in Orwellian editing.”

Giving the government the ability to access all communications is part of the general discussion of restricting what can and can’t be done online, and what is preserved for posterity. FBI Director James Comey has spoken aggressively in favor of limiting encryption technology and allowing the government “backdoors” into communications, and a bipartisan group of senators—including Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.)—seem open to mandating government access to communications over phones or the internet. Trump himself has called for a boycott of Apple products after the company got into a very public fight with the FBI, when the FBI wanted Apple to write software to break its own iPhone encryption following the 2015 San Bernardino attack. To Kahle, this provides further impetus for complete backups of his archive in other countries.

“There’s a lot of laws that are put in place that have built the world that we have,” Kahle said. “And to the extent that those are going to be up for grabs, then we can end up with a very different world.”

The Trump transition team and his spokesperson, Hope Hicks, did not respond to questions about his policies toward free speech on the internet.

As The Ringer’s Alyssa Bereznak put it the day before the election, Trump’s mastery of social media aside, “he has shown little understanding of the infrastructure behind the online tools that have extended his reach.” He jokingly asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails and said he wished he “had the power” to hack the Democratic National Committee. And there’s also Trump’s alleged history of listening in on phone calls involving staff at Mar-A-Lago, an allegation Hicks denied when asked by BuzzFeed. As for weaponizing the internet via cyberwarfare, Trump has described the United States as “obsolete” and called for a ramping up of US government capabilities.

“The first thing to do is listen to what people say they want to do. And when they say things like they want to close up part of the internet…that sort of thing is a big change to how the internet structure could work,” Kahle said. “Who knows what will exactly happen, but we’re starting with his words.”

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The Coolest Thing on the Internet Is Moving to Canada

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Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet

Mother Jones

Brewster Kahle is quick to point out that we are not standing inside a former Scientology church. Visitors to this looming white building in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond District are often confused about its past life as a meeting place for Christian Scientists, not to be confused with Scientologists. It is now a different kind of house of worship, known as the Internet Archive, where free digital access to all knowledge is the canon.

“The average life of a web page is about 100 days before it’s either changed or deleted,” says Kahle. “Even if it’s supported by big companies: Google Video came down, Yahoo Video came down, Apple went and wiped out all the pages in Mobile Me.” Capturing this transient web was Kahle’s original mission for the Internet Archive when he founded it in 1996. Nearly two decades later, the 53-year-old compares his organization to a “Library of Alexandria, version two.”

That may be an understatement. In addition to hosting the Wayback Machine, an ever-growing collection of more than 400 billion copies of web pages, the Internet Archive has also expanded its services by providing millions of free digitized books, TV shows, movies, songs, documents, and software titles. Want to see what MotherJones.com looked like in 1996? Here you go. Are you a Deadhead in search of rare recordings? There are more than 9,000 to choose from. Remember when federal websites were closed for business during the government shutdown? They were still available thanks to the Internet Archive.

Walking through the Internet Archive’s physical headquarters, which has occupied this former church since 2009, is a surreal experience. Built in 1923, the grand worship hall on the second floor remains intact, with wooden pews lining the floor and a podium sitting atop a stage. But stacks of humming blinking server racks now rest against the walls. And then there are the figurines—dozens of half-size human models that populate the outside rows of pews and immortalize Archive employees and volunteers throughout the years. Kahle’s mini-mannequin stands in the front row. Next to him is Aaron Swartz, the “Internet folk hero” who was a volunteer and contractor from 2007 to 2009. Swartz committed suicide in 2013 following a federal indictment for downloading the contents of the digital library JSTOR from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kahle remains disappointed with how prosecutors, MIT, and JSTOR handled the Swartz case. “Shame on them,” he says. “I think it’s a symbol of the old world and the old approach that must be overturned. There are some organizations that are still built around this idea of restricting, restricting, restricting, and that’s not going to fly.”

While Kahle is against restricting access to knowledge, he adamantly supports internet users’ right to privacy. In 2007, the FBI sent the Internet Archive a secret National Security Letter (PDF) seeking information about one of its patrons. With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kahle challenged the request and won. “That a library has to sue the US government is not terribly appropriate,” he says. But the Internet Archive’s relationship with the feds is not entirely prickly. It also provides web crawling and book scanning services for the Library of Congress. Kahle says the Patent and Trademark Office has used the Wayback Machine to research which ideas are novel or not.

A collection like the Internet Archive’s is extremely valuable. Kahle estimates it has about 15 petabytes of information (a petabyte is approximately one million gigabytes of data). That’s a lot less than Facebook’s estimated 300 petabytes, but there’s a big difference: “The Internet Archive is a nonprofit, and nope, there’s no buying it,” says Kahle. Kahle has sold other companies in the past. The Internet Archive was started with funding from the 1995 sale of his search system WAIS, which AOL purchased for $15 million. His online tracking service Alexa was sold to Amazon for $250 million in 1999. The Internet Archive’s current budget is around $12 million.

One of the Internet Archive’s fastest growing collections is its TV News Archive. For 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, HD feeds from more than 65 news channels, both foreign and domestic, are recorded on the Internet Archive servers. The feeds are fully searchable the following day. Roger Macdonald, who runs the project’s entire Television Archive, preaches treating all media as data. He says many TV and cable networks are “scared about experimenting” with closed captioning data that could make their content searchable by a global audience. By making its videos text-searchable, “our service has vaulted over the confines of the linear video storytelling,” he says. For example, when Harvard and MIT researchers studied how the media covered the Trayvon Martin shooting, they turned to the TV News Archive, using its closed captioning data to help map the story’s evolution.

In 2013, the Internet Archive received an unusual message from Michael Metelits. Metelits’s mother, Marion Stokes, who had recently passed away, had recorded more than 35 years of TV news in Philadelphia and Boston with her VHS and Betamax machines. Metelits was left with approximately 40,000 well-organized tapes, but he had nowhere to put them. So he emailed the Archive. “I thought there might be a typo in his email,” Macdonald recalls. “I couldn’t imagine an individual doing that.”

The donated collection turned out to be a goldmine. The TV News Archive began recording in 2000; Stokes had them beat by more than 20 years. And not only were her tapes in good condition, they also recorded closed captioning data, providing vital metadata. Digitizing and logging the massive trove, now stored in Richmond, California, is a challenge, to say the least. Macdonald says they’ve “only just scratched the surface of imagining what’s there.”

Sean Fagan, logistics specialist for the Internet Archive, with the Marion Stokes collection— 35 years of TV news recorded on VHS and Beta tapes. Brett Brownell

Looming above the Richmond storage facility where the Stokes collection resides is another element of Kahle’s ongoing mission. It’s an antenna broadcasting free internet, one of two free wi-fi access points the Archive provides to San Francisco Bay Area residents. (A third free wi-fi setup is in North Carolina.) He says cities “haven’t been doing their part” to provide faster access to the web and that communication infrastructure is “just as much the lifeblood as water or transportation to a city.”

Adding to its long list of projects, the Internet Archive is also taking a swing at the housing market. Kahle wants to apply the tech industry concept of “open sourcing” to disrupt (if you will) the Bay Area’s affordable housing crisis, which has been fueled in part by the booming tech industry. The Internet Archive has set up a separate nonprofit to purchase an 11-unit apartment building six blocks from its San Francisco headquarters, which it hopes will offer “debt free” housing to nonprofit employees. Macdonald says the first Internet Archive employee will move in later this year. Eventually, Kahle’s dream is “to transition 5 percent of all housing into a new housing class that would be dedicated to supporting the nonprofit sector.”

Even as he sets more ambitious goals, Kahle worries that the end of net neutrality could spell the end of the open web he’s fought to preserve. “If we lose net neutrality,” he says, “or if we let monopolization happen, whether it’s Comcast and AT&T in the United States, or other players in other countries, we will lose the magic that we’ve had for the last 20 or 30 years with this internet.” He urges other technologists to get involved. “We can’t just wait on government to do something. They’ll be bashed around by the commercial players that have all to gain from monopolization.”

Thinking about the current state of internet, Kahle says, “I wake up sometimes really depressed, and sometimes really optimistic.” But, he adds, “As they said in other struggles, you should know which side you’re on, and at least the Internet Archive knows which side it’s on.”

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Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet

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