FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is
148 comments
·November 6, 2025shevy-java
zahlman
> Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it.
Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content.
Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.
Yokolos
The difference is that we know who's running archive.org. We don't know who's running archive.is. That's perfectly fine for private use but unacceptable for a site like Wikipedia.
It's not that difficult.
mzajc
Where did you check this? While neither are listed on WP:RSP, I know many cites are changed into web.archive.org links once they go down.
heisgone
I heard stories of incriminating stuff for higher-ups disappearing from archive.org.
layman51
I heard stories about a potential Oracle data breach (I think mainly affecting their customers) being removed from Archive.org too. It’s because in general, they comply with requests to remove stuff, which is understandable from an ethical perspective. But do they at least try to explain the reason for the takedown? Is it just not feasible to do that?
throw0101d
> Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys.
Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.
BigTTYGothGF
> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here
Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
throw0101d
> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
baxtr
I agree. Knowledge should belong to all of humanity.
But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
phantasmish
There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.
Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
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warkdarrior
> There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.
Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
capitainenemo
While it's true people are upset at AI companies profiting off of artist creations with no compensation, I know a lot of people are also reacting to how the recent AI companies have been scraping the web. The reason folks are using Anubis and other methods is because unlike Google which did have archiving of sites for a long time (which was actually a great service), these new companies do not respect robots.txt, do not crawl at a reasonable rate (for us, thousands of hits a minute from their botnets - usually baidu/tencent, but also plenty of US IPs), hit the same resource repeatedly, ignoring headers intended to give cache hints, stupidly hitting thousands of variations of a page when crawling search results with no detection that they are getting basically the same thing... And when you ban them, they then switch to residential ranges. It really is malicious.
gilfoy
> AI companies profiting
Are they?
HeinzStuckeIt
A lot of the outrage isn't at scraping, it is at the disruptive techniques used to do so. Like web-scraping whole websites that already provide convenient images of their content for download.
pbae
Feels like now we're just redefining our rules so that the people we don't like are out and the people we like are in. Does the content creator have the right to determine how their work is used or not?
TrueDuality
This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.
kulahan
Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.
warkdarrior
So if OpenAI or <AI scraper of the day> adds attribution to their AI-generated answers, everything is OK?
dclowd9901
One thing is not the other. A corporation is not a human (and no I don't care what Citizens United says). A corporation has no inherent rights.
FractalParadigm
This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.
pkilgore
Hot take here, I know, but some of us believe the law should treat large corporations differently than it treats individuals when it comes to their rights and privileges.
otterley
> I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such
How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data?
Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.
pessimizer
> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here.
It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either.
> Knowledge itself should become a human right.
Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved.
It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.)
Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf.
I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.
perihelions
They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead? It's not even in their effective jurisdiction, if this indeed is a Russian national. Don't they have more important Russian crimes to investigate?
I read there was a US government investigation tracking Ukranian children abducted by Russian forces, but supposedly there weren't enough resources [0] to sustain that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/19/nx-s1-5333328/trump-admin-cut...
Aurornis
> They pardoned the Silk Road drug lord to go after a copyright infringement-lord instead?
The president’s pardons are not popular with the FBI and law enforcement. The FBI is not happy about doing all of the work to prosecute people only to have the president override it for political reasons.
avgDev
I don't think it is political reasons, seems like it is for large donation reasons.
lesuorac
That is a political reason...
It convinces others that you're willing to pardon them too in exchange for money and convincing other people is the definition of politics.
rokkamokka
In the US, this is much the same thing
buildsjets
Is there a difference?
nobodyandproud
Source? Any of them still employed?
joshmn
They got me—a copyright infringement lord—too. The FBI profile assigned to me even wrote in a case study that the FBI thought I was making millions, amongst other misses.
Their priorities are highly political.
freedomben
> Silk Road drug lord
Oh please. Ross was no saint by any stretch and it does look like he may have made a very dark decision at one point, but it didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a mountain of details and nuance around that case, including a whole host of law enforcement abuses that many people would find distasteful if not sickening if they actually got the whole story.
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gverrilla
there's no lordship because afaik there's no direct profit
yapyap
The US gov doesn’t even care about copyright infringement, just in the cases where big companies are inconvenienced by it and it’s done by an individual / small company instead of a mega AI corp swallowing up all copyrighted content to vomit out their own spin on it through algorithms.
mothballed
Trump pardoned Ross largely to buy the (big L) Libertarian vote. It was announced at his speech with the Libertarian Convention.
Not for any ideological reason.
prodigycorp
It's not the libertarian vote that he cared about in particular so much as it was the firehose of crypto money that was supporting free ross.
IncreasePosts
This seems more likely - how many libertarians are there in the US? Surely there are much larger groups you can appeal to if votes is what you're after
greatgib
When there are a few simple nice things making our lives a little bit more bearable, there are always other zealous assholes desperate to ruin that.
Here I speak about this site, but everyday we have new cases of that. Like "new tax on anything that starts to be popular" for France, or Google trying to kill our privacy and F-Droid by requiring all app devs to have attestation from them.
teeray
I pay subscriptions to some of these sites and still use archive.is on them because it is a more pleasant reading experience. No auth failures, no annoying popover windows begging me to subscribe to their dumb newsletter. Just the internet equivalent of a static piece of newsprint.
Scoundreller
I used to do the same with Lynx but enough websites have now broken it.
93po
ublock with annoyance filters also solves this
dtagames
While strangely unpopular here, Yasha Levine's[0] well documented premise is that the entire existence of the internet is designed for surveillance and content control, down to the chip level, and this is mandated and enforced through laws as well as more covert agreements.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
danso
The subpoena cites the following statute as authorization: "(1)(A) In any investigation of (i)(I) a Federal health care offense; or (II) a Federal offense involving the sexual exploitation or abuse of children, the Attorney General; or (ii) an offense under section 871 or 879, or a threat against a person protected by the United States Secret Service under paragraph Secret Service determines that the threat constituting the offense or the threat against the person protected is imminent"
One of the agents named in the subpoena appears to have previously worked on child exploitation cases years ago:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-6039/245948/202...
layman51
It is pretty sad that this is happening and that it apparently is at risk of just disappearing soon. I understand there are a lot of ethical concerns with that site, but if I use like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to try to save some specific documentation pages for certain proprietary software, it absolutely fails to actually save the content. So then it is just a bit more difficult to save a particular knowledge base article before it might get rewritten or updated.
joshmn
As someone who has been the target of an FBI investigation for what was effectively criminal copyright infringement (later arrested and did time in prison), my only takeaway is that this, if anything, just be a civil suit just like so many other similar cases of copyright issues.
In my personal experience, the priorities of the FBI are typically highly politically motivated. The exceptions are if you’re doing something seriously icky, or doing fraud that deceives people.
clueless
Is there a dump of all archive.is sites (similar to libgen dumps) in case it goes down, so it could be set back up again?
hrimfaxi
The government can take down huge criminal networks on the darkweb but can't identify the owner of a clearnet site?
tuhgdetzhh
Since you refer to the darkweb. The gov has extensivley studied Tor and likely has zero day exploits for the Tor browser and operates a bunch of Tor relays. Given enough time and effort it is very much possible for state actors to identify Tor users.
But unless you are a high profile gov target, Tor protects you well.
mmooss
> unless you are a high profile gov target, Tor protects you well.
How do you really know that? I understand the theory, but do you have evidence? Have you tested it or read research that has tested it?
I would hesitate to give advice to people when they could get hurt.
FuriouslyAdrift
Tor was created by the US Navy.
r721
That owner is not so simple - I recall how they alleged in a Wikipedia discussion he(?) used some botnet or proxy network for adding archive.is mirror links to Wiki entries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...
We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data.
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.