The FBI Has Seized Control of the Popular Website Archive.Today, Which Prohibits Paywalled Access to Its Content.
The FBI has seized control of a popular website that takes on-demand images of websites and may soon make it more difficult to bypass the paywall . The domain registrar for Archive.Today reportedly received a subpoena seeking to uncover the archive’s owner, as first reported by 404 Media . A PDF of the subpoena was published by the Archive.Today X account late last week.
The site is similar to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine , but is designed for short-term access rather than long-term data storage. Unlike the Internet Archive’s methodical web crawlers, Archive.Today responds quickly to user requests but doesn’t promise to save snapshots of the site’s state in the future. Essentially, the Wayback Machine is designed to show what a site looked like in the past, while Archive.Today is more of a way to see what it looks like now.
A popular option to avoid paywalls
An obvious use case is bypassing paywalls and other blocks that prevent users from accessing a website directly. Alternatively, you can use an Archive.Today snapshot to read an article without spending time maintaining the website it’s hosted on. Some users have reported using Archive.Today to check historical versions of websites and articles, although in my experience, it’s slightly less reliable than Internet Archive for this purpose.
It is unclear why the site was targeted.
While the FBI subpoena doesn’t disclose the exact reason for the request, it states that it “is related to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI.” Given Archive.Today’s potential to circumvent paywalls and similar efforts to crack down on tools like 12ft.io , it’s possible the investigation is related to copyright infringement.
Little is known about Archive.Today’s owner, except that the site’s original domain was registered in 2012 under the name Denis Petrov of Prague, Czech Republic. This name appears to be either common enough to hinder the FBI’s investigation or a pseudonym. In the subpoena, the organization requests Archive.Today’s owner’s “name, work address, and billing address,” as well as a host of other information, including employment history and phone records. The registrar maintaining the site had until November 29 to comply.
The site is still working.
Meanwhile, Archive.Today (as well as mirror sites like Archive.is) continues to operate and has made no statement on the matter, other than posting a PDF of the subpoena in an X with the word “canary.” The site’s owner previously stated that he couldn’t guarantee it would remain operational forever, and that “the assumption that [the archive] will be safe until my death is overly optimistic.” Perhaps the idea is that the subpoena is a canary in a coal mine?
It seems all users can do for now is wait and see. Archive.Today, incidentally, is not open source, meaning any threat to its owners could lead to the site and its mirror sites being shut down without an immediate successor.
The subpoena follows the news that Google has delisted 749 million URLs from the literary piracy website Anna’s Archive. Taken together, these findings suggest that copyright enforcement may soon become more stringent online.