The FBI’s trying to track down the site’s elusive owner

The FBI is attempting to track down the identity of the owner of Archive.today and its numerous mirrors, like Archive.is and Archive.ph. As reported by 404 Media, the FBI subpoena, which was posted on the official Archive.today X account, was sent to web domain registrar Tucows on October 30th demanding the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” associated with Archive.today.

The subpoena also requests telephone records, payment information, internet session info, network addresses, and even the services the site’s owner has used, such as email or cloud computing services. It goes on to say that this info “relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI,” but it doesn’t reference a specific crime.

  • RonSijm@programming.dev
    5·
    9 days ago

    It depends on the registrar. By the rules of icann:

    At least annually, a registrar must present to the registrant the current Whois information, and remind the registrant that provision of false Whois information can be grounds for cancellation of their domain name registration. Registrants must review their Whois data, and make any corrections.

    So if the FBI concludes that the provided WHOIS data is false, they could potentially still use that as reason to seize the domains