Unmasking Archive.today
The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of a criminal investigation, though it does not provide any details about what alleged crime is being investigated.
Tucows is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, and also incorporated in Pennsylvania. The company’s subpoena and warrant policy says it provides registrant information in response to civil subpoenas issued by US courts and warrants related to criminal matters.
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While copyright infringement would be a likely area of investigation for the FBI with Archive.today, the subpoena doesn’t provide specific information on the probe. The subpoena seeks the Archive.today customer or subscriber name, addresses, length of service, records of phone calls or texts, payment information, records of session times and duration of Internet connectivity, mobile device identification codes, IP addresses or other numbers used to identify the subscriber, and the types of services provided.
In contrast with the nonprofit Internet Archive, the operator or operators of Archive.today have remained mysterious. It has used various domains (archive.ph, archive.is, etc.), and its registrant “Denis Petrov” may be an alias.
Sketchy as it may seem, Archive.today has become as legitimized as the Internet Archive. I have found links to pages archived using the site in government documents, high-profile reports, and other unexpected places treating it as a high-grade permalink.
While the exact nature of the FBI investigation hasn’t been confirmed, it is speculated it can be related to copyright or CSAM (child sexual abuse material) dissemination issues. Altogether, the situation suggests growing pressure on whoever runs Archive.is, and on intermediaries that help make its service accessible. AdGuard DNS, as it turns out, may have just become one such pressure point.
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A few weeks ago, we were contacted by a representative of an organization called the Web Abuse Association Defense, a French group claiming to fight against child pornography. Their website is webabusedefense.com, and here is the archived version as of November 7.
They demanded that we block the domain
archive.today(and its mirrors) in AdGuard DNS, alleging that the site’s admin had refused to remove illegal content since 2023. To be clear, Archive.today allows users to take “snapshots” of any webpages, including potentially illegal material. In such cases, it’s the site admin’s job to respond to complaints and promptly remove that content.
This whole story is incredibly suspicious. Smells to me that there is an organized effort to take archive dot today offline, using “CSAM” as pretext. I am almost certain that there is a financial motive at play here; perhaps some group of paywalled content owners are resenting the fact that archive dot today is circumventing their paywalls.
