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The Internet Archive, a service that chronicles the life of the Internet, was hit with a massive hacking attack on 8 October 2024, leading to a read-only service.
For three weeks, webpages from the internet were not archived. And so, there is a “black hole” in the Archive’s history, affecting researchers’ ability to compare past with future content, making it difficult to verify and document changing definitions and statements.
The attack on the Internet Archive came against a backdrop of instances of censorship growing, with mainstream social media becoming more aggressive in deleting content. Coincidence?
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The Internet Archive was initially affected by a data breach and DDoS attacks on or around 9 October 2024, which led to its temporary shutdown. However, the organisation has since made progress in recovering and securing its services.
As of 14 October 2024, the Wayback Machine was back online, but in a read-only state. This means that users could view archived pages, but not add new ones.
By 24 October 2024, the Internet Archive announced that most of its main sites and services were back up and running, including publicly available texts, TV news search, borrowing, audio files, moving images, institutional uploads, institutional web archiving and access via the API. However, some services and features might still be interrupted for ongoing maintenance.
As of 29 October 2024, the Internet Archive confirmed that all its main sites and services were back online, with the exception of possibly some features and services that may still be undergoing maintenance.
At the end of October, Brewster Khale, the founder of Internet Archive, joined NPR to discuss the attack by hackers that put the archive offline for days and what may have happened if it had succeeded. You can listen to the podcast and read a transcript HERE.
Khale told NPR that there was no damage to the data. And although the Internet Archive is fully up and running, there is a “black hole” of three weeks where people were not able to archive content.
Was this act of sabotage a test to see if they were able to remove or restrict viewing of content from the archive? Or was it a test to create “black holes” in the archived records that those running propaganda and psychological operations don’t want people to see in the future?
We have already seen efforts to restrict access to archived records. Take for example the lawsuit where four major publishers took Internet Archive to court for making books available to read online in its ‘National Emergency Library’, which was started when bookstores and libraries were closed due to the covid “pandemic.”
After nearly three years of litigation, in March 2023, a US court sided with the publishers’ commercial interests to disallow non-profit organisations, including libraries, from lending books. The Internet Archive intended to appeal the court’s decision. In the meantime, the Open Library has to stop loaning only those e-books for which the publishers are offering their own “competing” e-books for licence. The court’s decision affects a surprising number of books, including older books, as can be seen from the tweet below.
In the article below, Jeffrey Tucker and Debbie Leman explore whether the recent attack on the Internet Archive is just another example of the normalisation of censorship and memory holing events of the past.
They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
By Jeffrey A. Tucker and Debbie Lerman as published by Brownstone Institute on 30 October 2024
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalisation. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in grey areas. Some like Brownstone Institute have given up on YouTube in favour of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform ‘X’ to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since 8-10 October – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real-time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on 8 October 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service (“DDoS”) attack that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real-time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organisation and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real-time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDoS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDoS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website JavaScript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologise for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
[Related: What Is JavaScript Used For? BrainStation]
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritised on a global level. The ‘Declaration of the Future of the Internet’ makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus, the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the 5 November election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behaviour, links, citations and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognisable territory. The covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-8 October 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
About the Authors
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder, author and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also a Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including ‘Life After Lockdown’, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
Debbie Lerman is a 2023 Brownstone Fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practising artist in Philadelphia, PA.
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[…] – Hacking of Internet Archive led to a “black hole” of archiving webpages before they were changed… […]
All major changes to Internet will come as buy ups and so called “hacker attacks” as tyranni came in a disguise of protection from an in silico “virus”. They have probably learned a couple of things during the Convid plandemic and are setting us up for the next one since this crap is far from over.
I don’t know all details about everything but have a somewhat broad hacker protected off line understanding of what they are and it is good enough for me. Their actions gave me an intuitive feeling as a child and life has been giving me a mental framework as an adult since one can easily judge a tree by it’s fruits.
An interesting but disturbing read-it all makes sense.
There are no ‘coincidences’ same with ‘luck’, God doesn’t play dice.
I quote “the internet was founded to be free and democratic” REALLY?
There is, and never was anything ‘free’ about democracy-I would have thought we’d have all learned that by now-it’s an illusion!
I sometimes wonder who Tim Berners Lee really is
They must have inventors for the things they give us. Like with the enigmatic creator of Bitcoin giving it an aura of from and for the people when it in reality probably is from the state to soften the population for a digital CBDC.
They have probably registered every key stroke since the inception of Internet.
Look what one can do with a $3K consumer computer and how much data it can store. Multiply it by clusters of supercomputers and endless racks of hard-drives. If one site can archive Internet then imagen what the state can do. This is more of a logical conclusion than some fit of paranoia.
His family history is very interesting!
Not surprising at all.
Censorship of search engines is massive.
“they” do not want humans to be informed.
Mainstream sites come up on searches.
I like search.brave.com
https://needtoknow.news/2022/03/ivanka-trump-a-young-global-leader-at-the-world-economic-forum/ one of the culprits
reinforcing conspiracies
reinforcing conspiracies 1
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