The FBI is targeting a popular on-demand website snapshot website and could soon make it difficult bypass internet paywalls. Website domain registrar Archive.Today was reportedly subpoenaed in an attempt to reveal the owner of the archive, as first reported 404 Media. A PDF of the subpoena posted on the Archive.Today X account late last week.
The site is similar to Internet Archive Wayback Machinebut is intended more for immediate short-term access rather than long-term record keeping. Unlike the Internet Archive's methodical web crawlers, Archive.Today works quickly, responding to user requests, but don't make any promises to save website snapshots for the future. Essentially, while the Wayback Machine is designed to show you what a website looked like before, Archive.Today is more about seeing what a website looks like now.
Popular paywall bypass option
An obvious use case is to bypass paywalls or other blocks that prevent users from accessing a website directly. Alternatively, you can use the Archive.Today snapshot to be able to read the article without the support of the site on which it is hosted. Others have told me that they use Archive.Today to check historical versions of websites and articles, although I have found it to be slightly less reliable than the Internet Archive for this purpose.
It's unclear why the site was targeted
While the FBI subpoena does not disclose the exact reason for the request, it does say it “relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” Considering Archive.Today's potential to circumvent paywalls and similar crackdowns on tools like 12ft.ioThe investigation may be related to copyright infringement.
Not much is known about the owner of Archive.Today, except for the site's original domain, which was registered in 2012 under the name of Denis Petrov from Prague, Czech Republic. It appears that the name is either common enough to interfere with the FBI investigation or is an alias. In the subpoena, the organization requests Archive.Today's owner's “name, service address, and billing address,” as well as a variety of other details, including employment history and telephone records. The web registrar hosting the site had until November 29 to comply.
The site is still working
In the meantime, Archive.Today (as well as mirrors like Archive.is) continues to operate and has made no statement on the matter other than publishing a PDF of the summons to X with the word “canary”. The owner of the site previously said that it does not guarantee that it will operate indefinitely, and that “it is too optimistic an assumption that there will be no risks.” [to the archive] before I die.” Perhaps the idea is that a subpoena is the canary in the coal mine?
For now, it seems the best thing users can do is wait and see. Archive.Today in particular is not open source, meaning that any threat to the person running it could result in the site and its mirrors being shut down without an immediate successor.
The subpoena follows news that Google delisted 749 million URLs for the literary pirate site Anna's Archive. Together, they point to an Internet that may become much stricter when it comes to copyright enforcement.
