FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/fbi-subpoena-tries-to-unmask-mysterious-founder-of-archive-today/

by incomplete • 8 months ago

65 30 8 months ago

arstechnica.com

duxup• 8 months ago

People who steal from Americans get pardons... archive.is gets the the Feds on them.

The current administration would be a good joke if it wasn't real.

walletdrainer5• 8 months ago

FWIW circumventing various paywalls is probably the bad thing archive.is is being investigated for, not the archiving bit.

dogma11383• 8 months ago

Do they actually do anything to circumvent paywalls or do websites just whitelist their crawlers?

rekabis• 8 months ago

An AdGuard employee working their Reddit subreddit let slip that the legal order that forced them to block those domains (from their ad-blocking DNS) was a - claimed! - result of Archive.today having saved CP and refusing to delete it.

Methinks someone accidentally archived the Epstein files, and the FBI is desperately trying to scrub the unredacted backups before the archive URL becomes well-known. That alone would align somewhat with the CP claim,

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45836826

walletdrainer5• 8 months ago

The subpoena is supposed to be secret

Ars inventing their own colour here. This is simply not true.

tw04• 8 months ago

Ars inventing their own colour here. This is simply not true.

What are you talking about? Right at the top of the subpoena it literally says in bold and all caps, and I quote:

YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFNITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.

t0mas88• 8 months ago

The "requested" part sounds like it's not mandatory, otherwise they would have used something like "you're not allowed to..." or similar language.

walletdrainer5• 8 months ago

You are absolutely allowed to do whatever you want with the subpoena unless you’re ordered by some authority not to do so.

dogma11383• 8 months ago

Regardless of this situation I actually think that websites like Archive and TWBM should be fully transparent.

A very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them. Most of the pages that cite archived copies do so because the live version is no longer available I would like to have some assurances that archive.is and the likes are not altering their content in any way over time.

Unironically content sensitive hashing of archival pages might be one of the few use cases where something like a blockchain might actually be useful for.

dpark4• 8 months ago

Why would the blockchain be useful here? You don’t need a blockchain to store a hash.

Galanwe3• 8 months ago

You do need some kind of reliable, distributed storage though. The sequential nature of a blockchain also ensures that such stored content is held no matter what by any full node.

JumpCrisscross• 8 months ago

very large partition of citations in Wikipedia for example relies on them

Is the Internet Archive related to archive.is?

cosmojg• 8 months ago

No, the Internet Archive is an organization that runs a web archive at archive.org while archive.is is an alternative domain for archive.today, a competing web archive run by an individual.

toast0• 8 months ago

The subpoena is for archive.today.

The .is TLD is run by ISNIC and they process registrations directly, and operating out of Iceland, it would be very strange if they took orders from the FBI.

lschueller• 8 months ago

I would bet, even when the fbi is able to track down archive.today, it will be a matter of hours until the archive is shifted to another network and reinstated.. Even though if a certain amount of archived data might be lost, the core service will be rehosted quite fast somewhere else, i would think.

FBI orders domain registrar to reveal who runs mysterious Archive.is site

Related Stories