In 2004, the US prosecuted a Saudi graduate student webmaster for helping set-up & administer websites which included supposed jihadi/terrorist content. The student was acquitted in a 1st Amendment-driven setback for the DoJ & Patriot Act:
It's been a while, so take all this as approximate-recollections-almost-15-years-later, but:
The US DoJ prosecutors used content from the Internet Archive as evidence against the student, to demonstrate what site content they thought was terrorist advocacy. This required an IA employee to appear as a prosecution witness, to authenticate the material presented as what the Archive had crawled earlier, and a reasonably-accurate record of what had been on the web. This led to a defense cross-examination that went something very roughly like:
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Defense Lawyer: "Is this material still viewable at the Internet Archive's website?"
IA employee: "Yes."
DL: "So the same content for which the defendant is being threatened with federal prison is available, today, from www.archive.org."
IA: "Yes."
DL: "Is the government prosecuting the Internet Archive?"
IA: "Not to my knowledge."
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The moral for me – a former IA employee, though not one involved in that case – is that not only should careless, spurious requests to remove "terrorist content" be mocked and resisted as abusive, but also perfectly accurate requests to remove actual terrorist content should be resisted as abusive.
Libraries and archives must honestly hold and make-available the full record of things that people, even bad people, are publishing. It's essential for understanding the world of today, yesterday, and decades ago. It's essential for the prosecution of crimes, the understanding of propaganda of all types, and for honest discussion of the law & society.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-jun-11-na-boise...
It's been a while, so take all this as approximate-recollections-almost-15-years-later, but:
The US DoJ prosecutors used content from the Internet Archive as evidence against the student, to demonstrate what site content they thought was terrorist advocacy. This required an IA employee to appear as a prosecution witness, to authenticate the material presented as what the Archive had crawled earlier, and a reasonably-accurate record of what had been on the web. This led to a defense cross-examination that went something very roughly like:
-----
Defense Lawyer: "Is this material still viewable at the Internet Archive's website?"
IA employee: "Yes."
DL: "So the same content for which the defendant is being threatened with federal prison is available, today, from www.archive.org."
IA: "Yes."
DL: "Is the government prosecuting the Internet Archive?"
IA: "Not to my knowledge."
-----
The moral for me – a former IA employee, though not one involved in that case – is that not only should careless, spurious requests to remove "terrorist content" be mocked and resisted as abusive, but also perfectly accurate requests to remove actual terrorist content should be resisted as abusive.
Libraries and archives must honestly hold and make-available the full record of things that people, even bad people, are publishing. It's essential for understanding the world of today, yesterday, and decades ago. It's essential for the prosecution of crimes, the understanding of propaganda of all types, and for honest discussion of the law & society.