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Comment by alwayslikethis | Hacker News Reader

For the purpose of avoiding court orders, it would be better to have two or three complementary organizations that are nominally unrelated:

Archive 1: Located in the US, hosts most of the content

Archive 2: Located in Russia, hosts content that the US has problems with, such as copyrighted material or government secrets.

Backups: Located in some relatively neutral countries, probably somewhere in the Middle East, like UAE.

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I feel like places like Russia would be too risky. Russia is just as interested in hosting "truthy" information that the US has problems with as anything else.

So you're hosting some leaks the US doesn't like, Russia decides there's a narrative around that ... but not all the leaks match that narrative and now you're in just as bad a place as any other.

Less free countries are just worse options all around ... and moving data isn't going to impress some of those countries / your locals will get harassed or worse if the same organization is hosting content they don't like elsewhere ...

Switzerland is the natural location for a backup country. Maybe hosting just costs too much there?

None of the countries you mention are countries I'd consider safe or neutral though; I'd instead consider a Scandinavian country, Iceland, Switzerland, or Australia / New Zealand. Germany, France, Spain and other western-European countries seem pretty solid as well, but only as secondary/tertiary locations within existing hosting parties.

None of those would be great choices if your aim is to host copies of classified US government documents, every one would comply with US requests to shut it down (and possibly extradite the folks who own those servers). You're kinda stuck having to chose a country that is comfortable opposing the US. Of course, that comes with its own many downsides.

> if your aim is to host copies of classified US government documents

I do not believe that is the aim of Archive.org. That sounds more like Wikileaks territory.

The GP post specifically suggested that. I agree that nobody at archive.org seems to have such a strategy in mind.

EU nations have strong libel and "Right to be forgotten" laws. Makes them unsuitable as archives of record.

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