The FBI Is Targeting the Popular Anti-Paywall Site Archive.Today

The FBI is targeting a popular website for snapshotting websites on request, and may soon make it harder to get past paywalls online. The domain registrar of the site Archive.Today has reportedly been subpoenaed in an attempt to uncover the archive's owner, as first reported by 404 Media. A PDF of the subpoena posted to the Archive.Today X account late last week.

The site is similar to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but is intended more for immediate short term access rather than maintaining a longterm record. As opposed to the Internet Archive's methodical web crawlers, Archive.Today's work quickly in response to user requests, but don't make any promises to keep website snapshots around in the future. Essentially, while the Wayback Machine is intended as a way to see how a website used to look like, Archive.Today is more about seeing how a website looks right now.

A popular option for avoiding paywalls

The obvious use case is to get past paywalls or other blocks that would prevent users from just going to a website directly. Alternatively, you could use an Archive.Today snapshot to be able to read an article without supporting the site hosting it. I have had others tell me they do use Archive.Today to check historical versions of websites and articles too, although I've found it to be a little less reliable than the Internet Archive for this purpose.

It's unclear why the site is being targeted

While the FBI's subpoena doesn't reveal the exact reason for the request, it does say it "relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI." Given Archive.Today's potential to skirt paywalls, and similar crackdowns on tools like 12ft.io, it's possible the investigation has to do with copyright infringement.

Not much is known about Archive.Today's owner, aside from the original site domain being registered in 2012 under the name of a Denis Petrov from Prague, Czech Republic. It seems the name is either common enough to throw a wrench in the FBI's investigation, or is a pseudonym. In the subpoena, the organization requests the Archive.Today owner's "name, address of service, and billing address" as well as numerous other details, including length of service and telephone records. The web registrar hosting the site had until November 29 to comply.

The site is still up, for now

In the meantime, Archive.Today (as well as mirrors like Archive.is) remains operational, and has not made a statement on the matter aside from posting the subpoena PDF to X, alongside the word "canary." Previously, the site's owner has said that they doesn't give guarantees that it will remain operational indefinitely, and that "it is an overly optimistic assumption that there will be no risks [to the archive] before I die." Perhaps the idea is that the subpoena is a canary in a coal mine?

For now, it seems like the best users can do is wait and see. Archive.Today is notably not open source, meaning that any threat to individual running it could see the site and its mirrors shut down with no immediate successor.

The subpoena follows news that Google has delisted 749 million URLs for literary piracy website Anna's Archive. Together, they point to an internet that might be about to get far more strict about respecting copyright.

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