Archivists work to save disappearing data.gov datasets
404media.co
404media.co
There's lots of people making copies of things right now, which is great -- Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. It's your data, why not have a copy?
One thing I think we can contribute here as an institution is timestamping and provenance. Our copy of data.gov is made with https://github.com/harvard-lil/bag-nabit , which extends BagIt format to sign archives with email/domain/document certificates. That way (once we have a public endpoint) you can make your own copy with rclone, pass it around, but still verify it hasn't been modified since we made it.
Some open questions we'd love help on --
* One is that it's hard to tell what's disappearing and what's just moving. If you do a raw comparison of snapshots, there's things like 2011-glass-buttes-exploration-and-drilling-535cf being replaced by 2011-glass-buttes-exploration-and-drilling-236cf, but it's still exactly the same data; it's a rename rather than a delete and add. We need some data munging to work out what's actually changing.
* Another is how to find the most valuable things to preserve that aren't directly linked from the catalog. If a data.gov entry links to a csv, we have it. If it links to an html landing page, we have the landing page. It would be great to do some analysis to figure out the most valuable stuff behind the landing pages.
Unfortunately it's a bit messy because we weren't initially thinking about tracking deletions. data_20241119.jsonl.zip (301k rows) and data_20250130.jsonl.zip (305k rows) are simple captures of the API on those dates. data_db_dump_20250130.jsonl.zip (311k rows) is a sqlite dump of all the entries we saw at some point between those dates. My hunch is there's something like 4,000 false positives and 2,000 deletions between the 311k and 305k set, but that could be way off.
Given the rapid take downs of websites (cdc, usaid) do you have a prioritization framework for which website pages to prioritize or do you have "comprehensive" coverage of pages (in scope of the project)?
As you allude to, I've been having a hard time learn about what sort of duplicate work might be happening given that there isn't a great "archived coverage" source of truth for government websites (between projects such as End of Term archive, Internet archive, research labs, and independent archivists).
Your open questions are interesting. Content hashes for each page/resource would be a way to do quick comparisons, but I assume you might want to set some threshold to determine how much it's changed vs if it changed?
Is the second question about figuring out how to prioritize valuable stuff behind two depth traversals? (ex data.gov links to another website and that website has a csv download)
In practice it's some mix of, there aren't already lots of copies, it's valuable to people, and it's achievable to preserve.
> Is the second question about figuring out how to prioritize valuable stuff behind two depth traversals?
Right -- how do you look at the 300,000 entries and figure out what's not at depth one, is archivable, and is worth preserving? If we started with everything it would be petabytes of raw datasets that probably shouldn't be at the top of the list.
Not so useful if something was edited a few minutes after posting, but it makes it more difficult for a new administration to suddenly edit a bunch of old data.
But you could do the same thing with any hashes, right? There is no need for a blockchain in the middle.
There’s also a size advantage. You can keep a diff on the archive for each hash being posted instead of the full index for every time you post a hash.
Still, Open Timestamps does exactly this, and had been running for over 8 years now.
The chance is exceedingly low that the PKI infrastructure of all the authorities becomes compromised.
This proves you generated it before this time.
You can also include in the hash the close of the stock market and all the sports scores from the previous day. That proves you generated it after that time.
Sports sports are an interesting source of entropy.
You are relying upon the authority of the beacon to be random, but good practice is to utilize multiple independent beacons.
[0] https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/interoperable-randomness-beac...
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/09/19/roughtime.html
https://int08h.com/post/to-catch-a-lying-timeserver/
I think in some ways the community was less prepared this time, because there was a lot of investment in 2016-2017 and then many of the archives created at that point didn't end up being used; partly because the changes at the federal level turned out to be smaller and slower in 2017 than they're looking like this time. So some people didn't choose to invest that way this time around.
[Edit: this means I think it's really important that data archives are useful. Sorting through data and putting a good interface on it should help people out today as well as being good prep for the future.]
In other ways there's much more preparation; EOT Archive now has a regular practice of crawling .gov websites before and after each change of administration, which is a really great way of giving citizens a sense of how their government evolves. It will just tend to miss data that you can't click to in a generic crawl.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/s/scOu1QuhNt
"Project Russia" is spiritual warfare
https://washingtonspectator.org/project-russia-reveals-putin...
Billionaire ransacking the Treasury https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/01/senator-warns-of-national-...
Bernie's statement about this
> https://washingtonspectator.org/project-russia-reveals-putin...
What in the Cold War conspiracy theory was that...
>> The Kremlin’s design necessarily depends on the adoption of a single world belief system or religion. Expect a syncretic, gnostic blend, rooted in hierarchy — the Russian Orthodox Church at the core, and other religious factions accorded favor based on demonstrated fealty.
Good luck with that. The most popular religions today are forked versions of one guys story that they couldn't agree on and have been involved in acts of genocide towards one another because of it--for centuries.
There's coordinated efforts starting to come together in a bunch of places -- some on r/datahoarders, some around specific topics like climate data (EDGI) or CDC data, there's datasets being posted on archive.org. I think one way is to find a topic or kind of data that seems important and search around for who's already doing it. Eventually maybe there'll be one answer to rule them all, but maybe not; it's just so big.
I do a bit of web archival for fun, and have been thinking about something.
Currently I save both response body and response headers and request headers for the data I save from the net.
But I was thinking that maybe if instead of just saving that, I could go a level deeper and preserve actual TCP packets and TLS key exchange stuff.
And then, I might be able to get a lot of data provenance “for free”. Because if in some decades when we look back at the saved TCP packets and TLS stuff, we would see that these packets were signed with a certificate chain that matches what that website was serving at the time. Assuming of course that they haven’t accidentally leaked their private keys in the meantime and that the CA hasn’t gone rogue since etc.
To me I think that would make sense to build out web archival infra that preserves the CA chain and enough to be able to see later that it was valid. And if many people across the world save the right parts we don’t have to trust each other in order to verify that data that the other saved was also really sent by the website our archives say it was from.
For example maybe I only archived a single page from some domain, and you saved a whole bunch of other pages from that domain around the same time so the same certificate chain was used in the responses to both of us. Then I can know that the data you are saying you archived from them really was served by their server because I have the certificate chain I saved to verify that.
- bigger resource usage. You will need to maintain a dump of the TLS session AND an easily extractable version
- difficulty of verification. OpenSSL / BoringSSL / etc. will all evolve and say, completely remove support for TLS versions, ciphers, TLS extensions… This might make many dumps unreadable in the future, or requiring the exact same version of a given software to read it. Perhaps adding the decoding binary to the dump would help, but then, you’d get Linux retro-compatibility issues.
- compression issues: new compression algorithms will be discovered and could reduce data usage. You’ll have a hard time doing that since TLS streams will look random to the compression software.
I don’t know. I feel like it’s a bit overkill — what are the incentives for tampering with this kind of data?
Maybe a simpler way of going about it would be to build a separate system that does the « certification » after the data is dumped; combined with multiple orgs actually dumping the data (reproducibility), this should be enough the prove that a dataset is really what it claims to be.
But the main content is not signed / checksummed with it, but rather a symmetrical session key, so one could probably manipulate this in the packet dump anyway.
I read about a Google project named SXG (Signed HTTP exchanges) that might do related stuff, albeit likely requiring the assistance of the publisher
But then you need the client to be trusted, which clashes with distributing.
Hypothetically, what about trusted orgs standing up an endpoint that you could feed a URL, then receive back attestation from them as to the content, then include that in your own archive?
Compute and network traffic are pretty cheap, no?
So if it's just grabbing the same content you are, signing it, then throwing away all the data and returning you the signed hash, that seems pretty scalable?
Then anyone could append that to their archive as a certificate of authenticity.
Not quite the same problem, but similar enough to have a similar solution. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt
But they didn't really go anywhere:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/52135/tls-with-...
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/103645/does-ssl...
There are some special cases, like I think certain headers for signing e-mails, that do provide non-repudiation.
For that, `tcpdump` with `SSLKEYLOGFILE` will probably get you started on capturing what you need.
Overall though I think archive.org is probably sufficient proof that a specific page had certain content on a certain day for most purposes today.
https://github.com/reclaimprotocol
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wmfdtIGPaN9uJBI1DHqN903tP9c...
It works by using public key cryptography and key agreement to get both parties to agree on a symmetric key, and then uses the symmetric key to encrypt the actual session data.
Any party who knows the symmetric key can forge arbitrary data, and so a transcript of a TLS session, coupled with the symmetric key, is not proof of provenance.
There are interactive protocols that use multi-party computation (see for example https://tlsnotary.org/) where there are two parties on the client side, plus an unmodified server. tlsnotary only works for TLS1.2. One party controls and can see the content, but neither party has direct access to the symmetric key. At the end, the second party can, by virtue of interactively being part of the protocol, provably know a hash of the transaction. If the second party is a trusted third party, they could sign a certificate.
However, there is not a non-interactive version of the same protocol - you either need to have been in the loop when the data was archived, or trust someone who was.
The trusted third party can be a program running in a trusted execution environment (but note pretty much all current TEEs have known fault injection flaws), or in a cloud provider that offers vTPM attestation and a certificate for the state (e.g. Google signs a certificate saying an endorsement key is authentically from Google, and the vTPM signs a certificate saying a particular key is restricted to the vTPM and only available when the compute instance is running particular known binary code, and that key is used to sign a certificate attesting to a TLS transcript).
I'm working on a simpler solution that doesn't use multiparty computation, and provides cloud attestation - https://lemmy.amxl.com/c/project_uniquonym https://github.com/uniquonym/tls-attestproxy - but it's not usable yet.
Another solution is if the server will cooperate with a TLS extension. TLS-N (https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/578.pdf) provides a solution for this. That provides a trivial solution for provenance.
People are still going to be suspicious of each other, and service providers are still going to leak their private keys, and whatnot.
Because they spend a lot of time censoring and covering things up.
RIP USA.
What a statement! How did you come to this conclusion?
It’s not just America either. Europe too. Australia.
Authoritarians copy and steal. Democracies innovate and adapt.
Democracies are more transparent and honest, which leads to better outcomes in all areas.
Time spent hiding information to appease the dictator and protecting “the party” is time wasted.
The Soviet Union? Yeah, the new offshore stuff (mostly? developed after the fall of the USSR) relied on western firms, but I believe the bulk of oil production still comes from / goes through domestically sourced systems. Gas production on the other hand was initially almost entirely built out by western firms, though that's obviously begun to change since the war in Ukraine.
China is in a very different spot. They did what the USSR failed, showed a an authoritarian/totalitarian state can keep up with Western democracies or even innovate much faster than them.
I guess great economies also give it away. RIP USA.
Some below of contractors that work with US AID:
- https://www.edu-links.org/ (taken down)
- https://www.genderlinks.org/ (taken down)
- https://usaidlearninglab.org/ (taken down)
- https://agrilinks.org/ (presumably at risk)
- https://www.climatelinks.org/ (presumably at risk)
- https://biodiversitylinks.org/ (presumably at risk)
A rough paraphrasing from Boondocks, said by the richest man in that neighborhood.
I did however just write a Python script to pull data.gov from archive.org and check the dataset count on the front page for all of 2024, here are the results:
As you can see, there were multiple drops on the order of ~10,000 during 2024. So it's not that unusual. There could be something bad going on right now, but just from the numbers I can't conclude that yet.
(Specifically it takes the first snapshot of every Wednesday of 2024).
If I get around to re-formatting my archives this week, I'll follow up on HN :).
Was there an EO targeting these areas?
Maybe this administration will get better over time?
I think it is likely that orders to these other agencies follows this model. Many other datasets are being targeted via EO 14168 which has quite wide impacts but doesn't appear at first glance to apply to what i would expect to be a part of NOAA and EPA reports.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/31/usda-climate-change...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/epa-employees-warned-of-immedia...
Congress rarely makes spending money it's goal, rather it appropriates money to accomplish some goal. Which is to say that if Congress wants a bridge across a river and appropriate 10 billion to build it, the President is not obligated to spend $10 billion if 7 or 8 or 9 will do. In some cases, Congress does appropriate money toward causes and intends all the money to be spent in furtherance of some guiding principle and in these cases all the money must be spent.
(You hear about it on the Internet as a way to Fight The Man on eg arrests stemming from protests or minor drug charges, but historically it was more often used to absolve white supremacists of murder.)
It seems that most legal systems from the start was intended to codify what was considered "just and fair" in the eyes of "the people".
Juries seem to have been put in place specifically to ensure that the legal system operates within this mandate, and to preven overreach or abuse.
Jury nullification is a weird rule that goes against the constitutional framework, but is so rarely used, at least for any important matter, that it has never really received too much scrutiny.
Rather, juries are generally a mechanism to prevent overreach by the executive (primarily) but also other branches of government (including the legislative branch). Not necessarily by going directly against laws (though that could also happen), but for instance by identifying laws that contradict the principles of the constitution. (Or other "deeper" laws, for that matter.)
Jefferson wrote : "Another apprehension is that a majority cannot be induced to adopt the trial by jury; and I consider that as the only anchor, ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of it’s constitution." [1]
Now, a liberal interpretation of this is that a jury has an independent power, possibly even a duty, to disregard laws they consider to be against the legal basis (constitution, legal traditions, etc) of a country, basically overruling the legislative in such cases.
In fact, this type of thinking is probably a big part of the reason why the SCOTUS will not and can not override many aspects of jury verdicts. Specifically, even the SCOTUS cannot overturn an aquittal.
In other cases (such as when the SCOTUS thinks the jury has violated the constitution, due process hasn't been followed, etc) it will instead invalidate a decision. (Which can lead to the case being dismissed or to a retrial, depending on the details)
[1]: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-15-02-0...
But if you you think there is no risk that the justice system can be misused for such political ends, then I suppose you have the same problems with Biden pardoning Hunter and half his family to protect them from politically motivated prosecution?
Or is it only wrong when Republicans do it?
At minimum I would say that the general public in a general election should have the same power to effetively pardon someone as the President has. After all, the electorate is the basis from which the President draws his power and legitimacy.
And not only for the President, by the way. The legitimacy of the entire system, including both Congress and the Legal System draws its legitimacy from the same source (even if the Constitution is designed to provide protection against short term simple majorities).
If the outcome of the vote cannot be accepted, then that basically means the country cannot remain a democracy.
Personally, I don't think I could have voted for Trump after how he behaved in January 2021 (if I were a citizen). Primarily because of how he betrayed Pence.
But Biden and Kamala sure made it a lot easier for him in 2024 than it would have been if the country had been led by someone like Obama.
Well, Trump made his intentions of prosecuting Fauci, Hunter Biden and many many others more than abundantly clear. He can't whine about Biden protecting people from the threat he himself had announced. (Well, he obviously can and does, and half the population falls for it)
NOFX - "The Idiots Are Taking Over"
Justice delayed is justice denied.
But I suppose 4 years with Biden/Kamala made it easier to forgive him, for many. Not just the MAGA base, but even swing voters.
Honestly, I think Democrats were contributing to this by the outrage over the January 6 riots. Half the country would consider the BLM riots as equally bad.
If instead, Democrats had focused on Trump's betrayal of Pence and general disregard for the institutions and traditions of the country, a lot more moderates would remain with the Democrats.
But as a foreigner, it seems to me that the prosecution of the Jan 6 rioters, not to mention Trump himself was excessive and overtly politically motivated. And it definitely took attention away from the less spectacular, but far more obviously immoral behavior he definitely, provably WAS guilty of leading up to January 6.
If the anti-Brexit brigade had descended on Downing Street with violence, with nooses swinging, after Boris Johnson in 2019 I personally would consider that far worse than say the riots in London in 2011 or the recent Southport originated ones.
Trump's case was a completely constitutional overreach. Thankfully they shot it down fast in court.
Of course, he can't get away with too much alone, but with the right appointees, judges, etc, who knows.
https://newrepublic.com/post/190983/top-treasury-official-qu...
EDIT: apparently Musk succeeded: https://bsky.app/profile/wyden.senate.gov/post/3lh5ejpwncc23
I'm not a legal scholar, but I'm going to guess that saying "congress appropriates money, but the President can decide if they actually get it" is a pretty fringe idea.
I don't even know what more to say. Paradox of tolerance so I'm no even going to pretend to empathize with ideas like"deport the illegals in chains " and ćmy body your choice".
Train v. City of New York isn't a constitutional case. So if Congress controls spending, it's a power they gave to themselves. Any other portion of government could likewise determine they control spending. So maybe it goes back to the SCOTUS because they agree to hear another case about it. Maybe they like the idea that the executive branch controls spending? Or maybe they don't after all. The tell the President to stop doing that. But the president does not. Does Congress pass another law reaffirming they control the power for spending?
If the executive branch is in charge of running the government and they listen to the President & the President decide's they aren't spending any money, who exactly is going to change that? Would Congress fund another department to change this? Would it also just report to the President?
From what I understand it's actually pretty common for the executive branch not to actually be able to spend appropriated money. The simplest case would be if you put out a contract and get no bids on it. There are other cases, like Congress agreeing to fund military submarines for Taiwan. But no one is going to build them internationally and we don't build diesel-electric combat submarines in the US as a matter of policy.
Why are you ok with the president being above the law? That idea was not considered normal even a couple years ago
Now if a president is not doing their job, not improving the lives of the citizens, and doing things for personal gain, that's another matter. That was more of a description of the previous administration, but I know I will probably get some downvotes here for saying so.
Removing data about provably unfair things like DEI is only going to upset people who still are hanging on to any hope that it will return. BTW, I check several of the boxes for DEI, and I'd rather it be gone as well. That ship has sailed and the president decided it is time to move past that phase for the greater good. I wouldn't call that an abuse of power. And even if it was, the same people saying so cried wolf so many times before, that it undermined trust in the system of checks and balances. So here we are.
CDC data are disappearing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897696 - Feb 2025 (216 comments)
Say you have a few TBs of disk space, and you're willing to capture some public datasets (or parts of them) that interest you, and publish them in a friendly jurisdiction - keyed by their MD5/SHA1 - or make them available upon request. I.e. be part of a large open-source storage network, but only for objects/datasets you're willing to store (so there are no illegal shenanigans).
Is this a use case for Torrents? What's the most suitable architecture available today for this?
.
> Is this a use case for Torrents?
Yes, provided you have a good way to dynamically append a distributed index of torrents and users willing to run that software in addition to the torrent software. Should be easy enough to define in container-compose.
Set up a scrape using ArchiveTeam's fork of wget. It can save all the requests and responses into a single WARC file. Then you can use https://replayweb.page/ or some other tool to browse the contents.
Not to say the data isn't incredibly valuable and should be preserved for many other reasons of course. All the best to anyone archiving this, this is important work.
The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42895331
> Changes in presidential administrations have led to datasets being deleted in the past, either on purpose or by accident. When Biden took office, 1,000 datasets were deleted according to the Wayback Machine, via 404 Media's reporting.
Time will tell but loss of public datasets is probably not usually good in general.
> But archivists who have been working on analyzing the deletions and archiving the data it held say that while some of the deletions are surely malicious information scrubbing, some are likely routine artifacts of an administration change, and they are working to determine which is which. For example, in the days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, data.gov showed about 1,000 datasets being deleted as compared to a day before his inauguration, according to the Wayback Machine.
Here's documentation on independent backup efforts of various government websites: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1ifalwe/us_gov...
Also here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1idj6dm/all_us...
Apparently, much of the data has been back up here: https://eotarchive.org/
Here's also a discussion on whether the Internet Archive is sufficiently backed up/decentralized (it is not): https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1if32iq/does_i...
As one of the reddit comments (in the thread linked by the article) pointed out,
> During the start of Biden’s term, On 6th feb data.gov had “218,384 DATASETS” but on 7th feb it only had “192,180 DATASETS”
How much of this sort of effort results in that data being used? Are there success stories for these datasets being discoverable enough and useful to others?
Removing and altering of the information and data is one of the fundamental threats in our digital world.
It probably makes the most sense to do this on a daily basis. If something new, if published, grab it as soon as possible.
Data can also be redacted or altered for a variety of reasons, being able to see the before and after states can be illuminating.
Something I feel is missing here are statistics for each administration.
Does this only happen under a Trump administration, or does it happen to smaller or larger extent under other administrations?
I don't know how far back this federal goes so it might not be easy,
- Borges
(Fun fact: the lesser-known state of Wey actually lasted longer than Wei due to not being worth conquering. In modern Chinese they are pronounced the same, but at the time they weren't.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi%20Huangdi (redirects to Qin Shi Huang)
Qin Shi Huang/Shih Huang Ti both means [Qin]Founding Emperor[-King]. In layperson's approximation, He's so ancient that his canonical name and title is debatable, and he's almost always referred to as "the first emperor" or variants thereof.
― George Orwell, 1984
I referenced 1984 in comment this morning related to websites disappearing. We’ve (always|never) been at was with Eurasia…
But sry might be a nitpick and obvious from context.
- "for god's sake please play by the rules, get into the power, and only then and only by doing so join us the Miniluv equals IRA; do not try to walk through the front door and topple the building by hand"
- "I thought you were smart enough to understand the intricacy of this game, spared precious resources for you, and giving you multiple chances. Your undecided and uncultured reactions to my efforts are irritating"
Mind posting a reference for such a declaration?
Gitmo being used as a transit camp for deported illegal immigrants is not at all as say, Sachsenhausen or Dachau being used to illegally dumb german citizens and torture them there indefinitely because they criticized the ruling regime. When Trump starts trying to dump opposing intellectuals, Hollywood producers and "wayward" reporters or writers into Gitmo for indefinite detention, then we can make some firmer claims of literal dictatorship.
If anything, the use of Gitmo under Bush II, when actual U.S citizens were held there indefinitely under terrorism charges was closer to the mark than this now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_evacuation_and_ex...
They even plotted to forcibly deport victims to fenced-in zones on an island which they would seize from another country, putting it outside their laws at home.
Except it wasn't Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but:
None of anything from Trump's government is at all comparable so far and making such comparisons, aside from being a genuinely idiotic case of ideological exaggeration, is also an insult to real victims of real historical concentration camps and violent regimes.
For all the self-congratulatory patting on the back by many readers on HN about their "superior" intellectual reasoning, I see a remarkable abundance of largely failing at such reasoning when it comes to many comment threads and subjects on this site.
It’s been less than two weeks and you are already doing the groundwork to preemptively excuse it.
I am however personally pessimistic about the probity of a camp run on a remote island without any oversight. And I think insisting that everyone wait until after a dictatorship is fully embedded and engaging in retaliation against political enemies (after making open threats to do so) is strategically stupid, much like saying you need to let an asailant get in 4 or 5 punches just to be sure the first two weren't accidental.
They may been operated by hundreds of regimes, but the term is 100% identified with Nazis now. It's a rather daft statement to say that these are not equated.
The reason this is being discussed here is because it isn't.
You realize this is a democratically elected government whose leader was already president once without a dictatorship?
Just a couple of weeks ago a federal court stopped his plans to end birthright citizenship in its tracks, and what was Trump's response? "We'll appeal it in court".... Oh damn! all those dictatoring plans stopped by the monstrous hurdle of constitutionally mandated judicial oversight.... You'd almost think he's not quite.... a dictator.
This kind of tedious hyperbole not only ran rampant before and during the first four years, it also made it harder to make genuine criticisms of Trump gain attention. With so much hysteria about every bullshit little thing being touted far and wide as an example of a 21st century Hitlerism, it's easy for the critics to be viewed as a laughing stock except in their own little echo chambers of like-thinkers.
Because all I've been seeing so far were excuses, he won't do that's (that promptly were then done), contorsions to justify his insane dribble and complete disregard for the law.
This guy is going to destroy your country, and it's absolutely mind-boggling people are cheering him.
He was already president for four years, and the next four years were so bad for the world and the US that he was asked to come back overwhelmingly. Or it could just be because the Republicans run democratic primaries that party leadership can't just overrule or turn into a mockery, and the Democrats don't.
> insane dribble
"Drivel." It's a common error.
that and the Nazi salute at the inauguration.
Tell me, how many other governments can you list that planned to deport large numbers of people living in their country out to a special island they controlled in order to take advantage of its extraterritorial legal limbo separating it from the source country?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
If I had a nickel every time that happened, I'd have two nickels, but it's weird that it's happened twice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Solution
Most famously on Nauru https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Ce...
Truly, at least use some basic bloody comparative reasoning to formulate arguments.
In a weird way the events of WWII saved the US from going down the same path because we were on it. Anything literally Hitler did became politically toxic and it's a bit worrying that this toxicity is wearing off. It kept us far away from the fence.
The thing that matters for concentration camps is large groups of related civilians detained to advance a political goal— to restore Germany to its former greatness or to make America great again.
(disclaimer: not an American)
> For example, in the days after Joe Biden was inaugurated, data.gov showed about 1,000 datasets being deleted as compared to a day before his inauguration
It's almost like this stuff happens regularly. If <insert Dem savior> wins in 2028, tons of government websites will also change in the first couple weeks of their presidency. Is it because they're a fascist dictator? Or is it because those websites reflect the administration's viewpoints on issues?
Wish people would take a deep breath and step back and think a little more. I despise Trump, but there's crying wolf and then there's the current state of media and online discourse. Trump thrives in this type of environment. He purposefully fosters it. Playing gotcha with him doesn't work because he doesn't care.
All I’m seeing is a president that is doing exactly what he promised, so I’m very much in the “let the chips fall where they may” category.