Internet Archive denies hosting 'terrorist' content | Hacker News Reader

Internet Archive denies hosting 'terrorist' content

bbc.co.uk

59 pointsheadalgorithm44 comments

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885.

This is depressing. Are we just going to erase chunks of history because we don't like it?

Hopefully the Internet Archive can at the very least simply mark some of the content as "non-servable" or something but continue to archive it for historical or research purposes. I'm not sure how that fits in with censorship, libel, copyright, or right-to-be-forgotten laws, but hopefully the restriction is just on showing the data, not storing it.

When we have time for cooler heads to prevail, hopefully this content can be resurrected once the information is no longer as timely or relevant.

The Internet Archive can and does "dark" content; it is not served, but is preserved on disk for the future.

It should be requestable by snail mail and token payment or with a similar amount of friction.

More realistically, content considered in peril should be replicated on nodes outside of the Archive's control. Fun fact: Every item in the Archive can be retrieved via a torrent. I leave it as an exercise to the reader on how to retrieve the Archive's item index, ascertain least replicated items, and how to retrieve and serve them.

I did not know what. You sir, have made my day.

Don't forget about https://dweb.me/

Really excited to see what comes out of the upcoming Dweb retreat the Archive is sponsoring.

Are we just going to erase chunks of history because we don't like it?

Yes. News sites now edit articles without posting a notice or a retraction. Search engines now de-index parts of the web, citing various reasons. Activist organizations are now writing founders out of their web published history.

When we have time for cooler heads to prevail, hopefully this content can be resurrected once the information is no longer as timely or relevant.

Nope. The power to rewrite history amounts to absolute power over the consensus perception of reality. Almost no one who realizes they have such power relinquishes it voluntarily. (No modern tech company I know of resembles Cincinnatus.) The optimal plan would have involved slowly changing things over time, such that it would be barely noticed. The implementation was botched by impatient humans, however.

Stewardship over all the world's information?

Stewardship over all of the people's social links and relationships?

"Don't be evil."

(To be balanced here, many of the fringe conspiracy groups would do the same thing, if they could, and erase or rewrite parts of history. The difference is that some big corporations and governments are a lot closer to having enough power to achieve such a thing.)

I'm aware how much of a cliche 1984 comparisons are, but this resembles Winston's job in the Ministry of Truth far too well.

Europe telling a San Francisco based company what to do. I'd say, give them the middle finger, but the article has this little gem inside it:

> If the Archive does not comply with the notices, it risks its site getting added to lists which ISPs are required to block.

Well, that's Orwellian. Great job, Europe.

American sites should start giving Europe the finger en-masse. Just return a black page with "Sorry, European officials have their heads up their asses. Tell them to fix it" like they did for SOPA and PIPA. Let them firewall themselves off to oblivion.

This is why free speech is such an essential right in the United States, and probably contributes to the success it’s had as a country in making things. It’s hard to create when some government can come along and crush your idea. I can’t think of any other country in the world that has fewer limits on speech.

Absolutely. The Internet Archive should not sacrifice its core mission so that Europeans governments can impose censorship without impacting their citizens negatively.

It's a good thing that https://dweb.me/ exists. "The Internet views censorship as damage and routes around it."

Meanwhile, I'd like to point out a little phenomenon.

Facebook: We're banning "fake news".

HN: Oh, this was so needed. They're not the government, so this is fantastic!

Facebook: We're banning "hate speech".

HN: Bravo, so brave of them. About time! A brighter future. Wonder if AI can automate this.

Facebook: This is a great idea. Governments, please make this mandatory.

HN: Wait, what!? Don't trust Zuck!

And now, here we are. Please stop the uncharitable "why do you think the 1st amendment applies to facebook" responses. We never did. Free speech is more than just some concept that only applies to governments.

When the general public ceases to respect and defend freedom of speech for each other, they will soon find the government coming for it.

Should large sites try their best effort at removing this content? Absolutely. Should there be a law saying that if you fail to do so (within a ridiculously short time-frame), you will be forced to give us money or completely blocked? Absolutely not.

There's a huge difference between those two. One is open to nuance and to the reality of how hard content moderation is; the other is a blind hammer that does more harm than good.

> Should large sites try their best effort at removing this content

"This content" being... what? Hateful posts? Falsehoods? The sites are incapable of discerning what is hateful or false.

Don't blend in "the site banned User A threatening to murder Politician B" with "the site banned User A for saying hateful things". One of them is objective, the other is subjective.

> The sites are incapable of discerning what is hateful or false.

Oh definitely, it's a grey area, hence me saying that making it law obliterates any chance for nuance.

Maddox took this approach back in '04.

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=websense

I suspect this goes with the territory of the U.S. giving up control of the internet to international bodies. Disclaimer: I don't claim to have a deep understanding of any of these issues. But I will point out no other great power, the E.U. included, has the same level of freedom of speech guarantees in their constitutions. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-rel...

I totally agree this is shitty. But I mean come on. Glass house much...? :-)

I know there's no "real" difference between archive.org and other sites, but I think of it more as a museum or library than a publication.

Feels very strange to demand a museum or a library to destroy items in their collection.

This is how far we've come, sadly.

The fact that modern people are outraged when information like this is hidden from general view is in fact a testament to how far we have come as a society.

Already so much of the syrian civil war has been lost. Amaq, the ISIS news agency posted a huge amount of propaganda and information. All factions were involved in a very heavy media war as well as a physical one. Seeing these videos, articles, posts, tweets, and pictures disappear is really sad. There are efforts to keep it documented but I'm of the general belief that this information should all be saved and stored.

This is embarassing on so many levels. For the record, those weren't "false" reports, they were false reports. No need for scare quotes here, just read the blog[0] (also, good job BBC for not linking to the blog). Among the links asked to be taken down are scholar articles on Spectrum Sharing or US reports.

Furthermore, laws that require action "within the hour" from small organizations that don't have the manpower to answer those shouldn't exist. The fact that the Internet Archive risks getting blocked is ridiculous. Those laws have a huge potential for abuse.

And finally, despite this having hit the news yesterday already, they are still "receiving lots of takedown notices from the French IRU." So it looks like the IRU doesn't give a crap. This is a sad world we live in.

[0]: https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-fal...

> For the record, those weren't "false" reports, they were false reports.

The BBC has always had this very aggressive quoting style, and they're not wrong. They're reporting that the Archive believes the reports to be false. The word is quoted because the archive is the one making the assertion, not the BBC. The phrase "terrorist propaganda" is also quoted because it's the claim made by the other side, also being presented without judgment of truth from the BBC.

Is A Data Massacre Coming? There has been an issue before.[2]

1) "Europol said the requests actually came from the French IRU which routed its requests through Europol.

The French IRU has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment on why it issued so many reports to the site"

[2] i found this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44112431 [year2018] apperently there was some sort of problem, in 2018 - did IS go stego on the archive? Nope at least not regarding the triggering materials.

There may be a really big problem here.

In 2004, the US prosecuted a Saudi graduate student webmaster for helping set-up & administer websites which included supposed jihadi/terrorist content. The student was acquitted in a 1st Amendment-driven setback for the DoJ & Patriot Act:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-jun-11-na-boise...

It's been a while, so take all this as approximate-recollections-almost-15-years-later, but:

The US DoJ prosecutors used content from the Internet Archive as evidence against the student, to demonstrate what site content they thought was terrorist advocacy. This required an IA employee to appear as a prosecution witness, to authenticate the material presented as what the Archive had crawled earlier, and a reasonably-accurate record of what had been on the web. This led to a defense cross-examination that went something very roughly like:

-----

Defense Lawyer: "Is this material still viewable at the Internet Archive's website?"

IA employee: "Yes."

DL: "So the same content for which the defendant is being threatened with federal prison is available, today, from www.archive.org."

IA: "Yes."

DL: "Is the government prosecuting the Internet Archive?"

IA: "Not to my knowledge."

-----

The moral for me – a former IA employee, though not one involved in that case – is that not only should careless, spurious requests to remove "terrorist content" be mocked and resisted as abusive, but also perfectly accurate requests to remove actual terrorist content should be resisted as abusive.

Libraries and archives must honestly hold and make-available the full record of things that people, even bad people, are publishing. It's essential for understanding the world of today, yesterday, and decades ago. It's essential for the prosecution of crimes, the understanding of propaganda of all types, and for honest discussion of the law & society.

This news is making me appreciate all those decentralized blockchain based internet ideas floating around a little bit more. You can't remove anything from them, which is both good and very bad. I'm torn, but only because of bad actors in governments causing unnecessary and stupid problems.

This is why I wish that us, europeans had the United States Bill of Rights. Every character of it.

That's a pretty unusual belief. I'm under the impression that nearly no-one in Europe views the 2nd Amendment as rational. Out of curiosity, do you actively support the entire Bill of Rights, or are you just asserting that it would be better on balance, warts included?

I love the 2nd. And yes, I am an outlier.

Besides, some European countries are starting to see civilian gun ownership as inherently normal, like Czech Republic and Estonia. Though European Union has started to impose some arbritary restrictions on civilian gun ownership, such as what features a gun can have and magazine capacity restrictions.

there are two sides to the bill of rights, written in a time when honourability was a common goal, the bill is about responibilities as well as rights, this is a culturally implied >character< the text does not explicity say responsibilities.

These kinds of automated takedown requests are a real hassle for any public archive. For Pinboard stuff, I regularly get scary notices from my ISP claiming I am hosting phishing content because someone bookmarked an Amazon page and an automated bot later found their archived copy.

The problem is unavoidable for a public archive when the people filing claims against you use automated tools while the appeal process is either time-consuming or nonexistent.

https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-fal...

The blog post on archive.org about it is worth a read. French IRU should be punished for this crap.

Feelsgood that we're moving towards a single modifiable repo of history! What could go wrong?

The purpose of the Internet archive is to maintain history, and they are a really great resource. To do this though, they don't really need to make current content live - they could just as well have a 6-month embargo between archiving content and making it live. This would make it hard for anyone to abuse it as a way round censorship, at least for for timely content, which most terrorist propaganda is.

I'm not trying to excuse the French IRU's excessive and rather broken censorship requests, but the archive's current behaviour is ripe for abuse.

So there’s a time limit on censorship and free speech?

I never said any such thing. They'll still get takedown notices after 6 months, and they'll have to fight them as appropriate. It's just they won't be inviting abuse by people wanting to use them as a free CDN in the way they do right now.

Blog from Archive was two days ago (was even discussed on HN, before, see below)[0, 1]. I guess the BBC is running out of stuff to distract people with?

[0] - https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-fal...

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885

It seems sensibile that digital items could become rare, and from my brief research archival copies are permitted under fair use. Storage is cheap and small, a raspi and a dufflebag of replacements is cheap... you see where I am going.

YUP exactly! More or less, ive already gone there. Anyone in range that signs on can read from the library.

What a click-baity, biased headline.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com