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.
They should launch an LLM so they become immune to copyright
What a useless subpoena.
Tucows will return something like “Hugh Gazz; 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Wash DC; (703)684-3344; dick.cheney@hotmail.com. They paid for the next 10 years with Visa gift cards purchased at a bodega in Istanbul, Turkey”
And they won’t be lying.
Anyone associated with archive.today isn’t going to be directly connecting to anything close to the site without a VPN. Unless they are stupid, of course.
The article on 404 alludes to it being a single Russian “of considerable talent.”
Good luck, Feebs.
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
Ah, yeah. All they really want are the domains so they can shut it down. Good point.
Probably some copyright crap. I’m glad archive.is exists. It’s just a pity it isn’t opensource.
