DDoSed by Policy: Website Takedowns and Keeping Information Alive

Who needs a DDoS (Denial of Service) attack when you have a new president? As of February 2nd, thousands of web pages and datasets have been removed from the U.S. government agencies following a series of executive orders. The impacts span the Department of Veteran Affairs and the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, all the way to programs like Head Start.

Government workers had just two days to carry out sweeping takedowns and rewrites due to a memo from the Office of Personnel Management. The memo cites a recent executive order attacking Trans people and further stigmatizing them by forbidding words used to accurately describe sex and gender. The result was a government-mandated censorship to erase these identities from a broad swatch of websites, resources, and scientific research regardless of context. This flurry of confusion comes on the heels of another executive order threatening CDC research by denying funding for government programs which promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion or climate justice. What we’re left with has been an anti-science, anti-speech, and just plain dangerous fit of panic with untold impacts on the most vulnerable communities.

The good news is technologists, academics, librarians, and open access organizations rushed to action to preserve and archive the information once contained on these sites. While the memo’s deadline has passed, these efforts are ongoing and you can still help.

Fighting Back

New administrations often revise government pages to reflect new policies, though they are usually archived, not erased. These takedowns are alarming because they go beyond the usual changes in power, and could deprive the public of vital information, including scientific research impacting many different areas ranging from life saving medical research to the deadly impacts of climate change.

To help mitigate the damage, institutions like the Internet Archive provided essential tools to fight these memory holes, such as their “End of Term” archives, which include public-facing websites (.gov, .mil, etc) in the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the government. But anyone can use the Wayback Machine for other sites and pages: if you have something that needs archiving, you can easily do so here. Submitted links will be backed up and can be compared to previous versions of the site. Even if you do not have direct access to a website’s full backup or database, saving the content of a page can often be enough to restore it later. While the Wayback archive is surprisingly extensive, some sites or changes still slip through the cracks, so it is always worth submitting them to be sure the archive is complete.

Academics are also in a unique position to protect established science and historical record of this public data. Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School, for example, has been preserving websites for courts and law journals. This has included hundreds of thousands of valuable datasets from data.gov, government git repositories, and more. This initiative is also building new open-source tools so that others can also make verifiable backups.

The impact of these executive orders go beyond public-facing website content. The CDC, impacted by both executive orders, also hosts vital scientific research data. If someone from the CDC were interested in backing up vital scientific research that isn’t public-facing, there are other road maps as well. Sci-Hub, a project to provide free and unrestricted access to all scientific knowledge that contains 85 million scientific articles, was kept alive by individuals downloading and seeding 850 torrents containing Sci-Hub’s 77 TB library. A community of “data hoarders,” independent archivists who declare a “rescue target” and build a “rescue team” of storage and seeders, are also archiving public datasets, like those formerly available at data.cdc.gov, which were not saved in the Internet Archive’s End of Term Archive.

Dedicating time to salvage, upload, and stop critical data from going dark, as well as rehosting later, is not for everyone, but is an important way to fight back against these kinds of takedowns.

Maintaining Support for Open Information

This widespread deletion of information is one of the reasons EFF is particularly concerned with government-mandated censorship in any context: It can be extremely difficult to know how exactly to comply, and it’s often easier to broadly remove huge swathes of information rather than risk punishment. By rooting out inconvenient truths and inconvenient identities, untold harms are done to the people most removed from power, and everyone’s well being is diminished.

Proponents of open information who have won hard fought censorship battles in the past that helped to create the tools and infrastructure needed to protect us in this moment. The global collaborative efforts afforded by digital technology means the internet rarely forgets, all thanks to the tireless work of institutional, community, and individuals in the face of powerful and erratic censors.

We appreciate those who have stepped in. These groups need constant support, especially our allies who have had their work threatened, and so EFF will continue to advocate for both their efforts and for policies which protect progress, research, and open information.