FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Archive.is Site

It is one of the most mysterious and, at the same time, best-known websites on the internet. Archive.today has built up a user base over a period of more than ten years who use the service to access previous snapshots of a web page. So basically like the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive, only largely free of rules and presumably therefore also anonymous. To the chagrin of the media industry, the service is also often used to bypass paywalls. This is also possible because the service does not adhere to common rules and laws and offers no opt-out option.

And so far, the operators have gotten away with it. Although there have been minor problems in the history of the service occasionally, for example, a top-level domain operator denied them further use of one of the many archive domains. However, the operation of the project, which is allegedly financed by donations and own funds, was not seriously endangered.

Court Order in the USA

But now the operators of archive.today are apparently fearing bigger trouble. In recent months and years, they had become noticeably quieter. Until two years ago, for example, questions were regularly answered in the blog. In the official X account, which had been silent for over a year, a new post appeared at the end of October new post. “Canary,” it said there, along with a URL. The mentioned canary bird is likely an allusion to an old custom in mining. A canary brought along warned the miners when it keeled over dead about the threat of invisible gas.

The deadly danger that the site operators fear is apparently linked to the PDF linked in the X post linked PDF. It contains a court order that the US investigative authority FBI has obtained. It instructs the Canadian provider Tucows to hand over comprehensive data about the customer behind archive.today. It concerns address and connection data as well as payment information. If Tucows does not provide the data, penalties are threatened. Whether the court order is genuine and how the operators of the site obtained it could not be verified so far.

Is the operator based in Russia?

Why the FBI is currently interested in archive.today, which is also accessible under the domains archive.is and archive.ph, is not evident from the court order. However, there are several obvious starting points for investigations: in addition to the obvious reason of copyright issues, the investigators could also be pursuing suspicions about unclear financing, the origin of the operators, or the technical approach.

In 2023, Finnish blogger Janni Patokallio compiled various clues and research results in a post in a post. According to this, Archive.today uses a botnet with changing IP addresses to circumvent anti-scraping measures. There are also indications that the operator(s) are based in Russia.

(mki)

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This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.