
Internet Archive denies hosting 'terrorist' content - headalgorithm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47908220
======
sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885).

------
andrewla
This is depressing. Are we just going to erase chunks of history because we
don't like it?

Hopefully the Internet Archive can at the very least simply mark some of the
content as "non-servable" or something but continue to archive it for
historical or research purposes. I'm not sure how that fits in with
censorship, libel, copyright, or right-to-be-forgotten laws, but hopefully the
restriction is just on showing the data, not storing it.

When we have time for cooler heads to prevail, hopefully this content can be
resurrected once the information is no longer as timely or relevant.

~~~
stcredzero
_Are we just going to erase chunks of history because we don 't like it?_

Yes. News sites now edit articles without posting a notice or a retraction.
Search engines now de-index parts of the web, citing various reasons. Activist
organizations are now writing founders out of their web published history.

 _When we have time for cooler heads to prevail, hopefully this content can be
resurrected once the information is no longer as timely or relevant._

Nope. The power to rewrite history amounts to absolute power over the
consensus perception of reality. Almost no one who realizes they have such
power relinquishes it voluntarily. (No modern tech company I know of resembles
Cincinnatus.) The optimal plan would have involved slowly changing things over
time, such that it would be barely noticed. The implementation was botched by
impatient humans, however.

Stewardship over all the world's information?

Stewardship over all of the people's social links and relationships?

"Don't be evil."

(To be balanced here, many of the fringe conspiracy groups would do the same
thing, if they could, and erase or rewrite parts of history. The difference is
that some big corporations and governments are a lot closer to having enough
power to achieve such a thing.)

~~~
jimmaswell
I'm aware how much of a cliche 1984 comparisons are, but this resembles
Winston's job in the Ministry of Truth far too well.

------
bjt2n3904
Europe telling a San Francisco based company what to do. I'd say, give them
the middle finger, but the article has this little gem inside it:

> If the Archive does not comply with the notices, it risks its site getting
> added to lists which ISPs are required to block.

Well, that's Orwellian. Great job, Europe.

American sites should start giving Europe the finger en-masse. Just return a
black page with "Sorry, European officials have their heads up their asses.
Tell them to fix it" like they did for SOPA and PIPA. Let them firewall
themselves off to oblivion.

~~~
bjt2n3904
Meanwhile, I'd like to point out a little phenomenon.

Facebook: We're banning "fake news".

HN: Oh, this was so needed. They're not the government, so this is fantastic!

Facebook: We're banning "hate speech".

HN: Bravo, so brave of them. About time! A brighter future. Wonder if AI can
automate this.

Facebook: This is a great idea. Governments, please make this mandatory.

HN: Wait, what!? Don't trust Zuck!

And now, here we are. Please stop the uncharitable "why do you think the 1st
amendment applies to facebook" responses. We never did. Free speech is more
than just some concept that only applies to governments.

When the general public ceases to respect and defend freedom of speech for
each other, they will soon find the government coming for it.

~~~
ehsankia
Should large sites try their _best effort_ at removing this content?
Absolutely. Should there be a law saying that if you fail to do so (within a
ridiculously short time-frame), you will be forced to give us money or
completely blocked? Absolutely not.

There's a huge difference between those two. One is open to nuance and to the
reality of how hard content moderation is; the other is a blind hammer that
does more harm than good.

~~~
bjt2n3904
> Should large sites try their best effort at removing this content

"This content" being... what? Hateful posts? Falsehoods? The sites are
incapable of discerning what is hateful or false.

Don't blend in "the site banned User A threatening to murder Politician B"
with "the site banned User A for saying hateful things". One of them is
objective, the other is subjective.

~~~
ehsankia
> The sites are incapable of discerning what is hateful or false.

Oh definitely, it's a grey area, hence me saying that making it law
obliterates any chance for nuance.

------
foxbarrington
I know there's no "real" difference between archive.org and other sites, but I
think of it more as a museum or library than a publication.

Feels very strange to demand a museum or a library to destroy items in their
collection.

~~~
groestl
This is how far we've come, sadly.

~~~
EpicEng
The fact that modern people are outraged when information like this is hidden
from general view is in fact a testament to how far we have come as a society.

------
calvinmorrison
Already so much of the syrian civil war has been lost. Amaq, the ISIS news
agency posted a huge amount of propaganda and information. All factions were
involved in a very heavy media war as well as a physical one. Seeing these
videos, articles, posts, tweets, and pictures disappear is really sad. There
are efforts to keep it documented but I'm of the general belief that this
information should all be saved and stored.

------
roblabla
This is embarassing on so many levels. For the record, those weren't "false"
reports, they were false reports. No need for scare quotes here, just read the
blog[0] (also, good job BBC for not linking to the blog). Among the links
asked to be taken down are scholar articles on Spectrum Sharing or US reports.

Furthermore, laws that require action "within the hour" from small
organizations that don't have the manpower to answer those shouldn't exist.
The fact that the Internet Archive risks getting blocked is ridiculous. Those
laws have a huge potential for abuse.

And finally, despite this having hit the news yesterday already, they are
still "receiving lots of takedown notices from the French IRU." So it looks
like the IRU doesn't give a crap. This is a sad world we live in.

[0]: [https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-
fal...](https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-falsely-
report-more-than-550-archive-org-urls-as-terrorist-content/)

~~~
0xffff2
> For the record, those weren't "false" reports, they were false reports.

The BBC has always had this very aggressive quoting style, and they're not
wrong. They're reporting that the Archive believes the reports to be false.
The word is quoted because the archive is the one making the assertion, not
the BBC. The phrase "terrorist propaganda" is also quoted because it's the
claim made by the other side, also being presented without judgment of truth
from the BBC.

------
rolph
Is A Data Massacre Coming? There has been an issue before.[2]

1) "Europol said the requests actually came from the French IRU which routed
its requests through Europol.

The French IRU has not yet responded to a BBC request for comment on why it
issued so many reports to the site"

[2] i found this:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44112431](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44112431)
[year2018] apperently there was some sort of problem, in 2018 \- did IS go
stego on the archive? Nope at least not regarding the triggering materials.

There may be a really big problem here.

------
gojomo
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:

[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-jun-11-na-
boise...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-jun-11-na-
boise11-story.html)

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.

------
mevile
This news is making me appreciate all those decentralized blockchain based
internet ideas floating around a little bit more. You can't remove anything
from them, which is both good and very bad. I'm torn, but only because of bad
actors in governments causing unnecessary and stupid problems.

------
sgjohnson
This is why I wish that us, europeans had the United States Bill of Rights.
Every character of it.

~~~
0xffff2
That's a pretty unusual belief. I'm under the impression that nearly no-one in
Europe views the 2nd Amendment as rational. Out of curiosity, do you actively
support the entire Bill of Rights, or are you just asserting that it would be
better on balance, warts included?

~~~
sgjohnson
I love the 2nd. And yes, I am an outlier.

Besides, some European countries are starting to see civilian gun ownership as
inherently normal, like Czech Republic and Estonia. Though European Union has
started to impose some arbritary restrictions on civilian gun ownership, such
as what features a gun can have and magazine capacity restrictions.

------
idlewords
These kinds of automated takedown requests are a real hassle for any public
archive. For Pinboard stuff, I regularly get scary notices from my ISP
claiming I am hosting phishing content because someone bookmarked an Amazon
page and an automated bot later found their archived copy.

The problem is unavoidable for a public archive when the people filing claims
against you use automated tools while the appeal process is either time-
consuming or nonexistent.

------
Kiro
[https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-
fal...](https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-falsely-
report-more-than-550-archive-org-urls-as-terrorist-content/)

The blog post on archive.org about it is worth a read. French IRU should be
punished for this crap.

------
formalsystem
Feelsgood that we're moving towards a single modifiable repo of history! What
could go wrong?

------
mhandley
The purpose of the Internet archive is to maintain history, and they are a
really great resource. To do this though, they don't really need to make
_current_ content live - they could just as well have a 6-month embargo
between archiving content and making it live. This would make it hard for
anyone to abuse it as a way round censorship, at least for for timely content,
which most terrorist propaganda is.

I'm not trying to excuse the French IRU's excessive and rather broken
censorship requests, but the archive's current behaviour is ripe for abuse.

~~~
bleriot
So there’s a time limit on censorship and free speech?

~~~
mhandley
I never said any such thing. They'll still get takedown notices after 6
months, and they'll have to fight them as appropriate. It's just they won't be
inviting abuse by people wanting to use them as a free CDN in the way they do
right now.

------
maxheadroom
Blog from Archive was two days ago (was even discussed on HN, before, see
below)[0, 1]. I guess the BBC is running out of stuff to distract people with?

[0] - [https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-
fal...](https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/official-eu-agencies-falsely-
report-more-than-550-archive-org-urls-as-terrorist-content/)

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19627885)

------
harlanji
It seems sensibile that digital items could become rare, and from my brief
research archival copies are permitted under fair use. Storage is cheap and
small, a raspi and a dufflebag of replacements is cheap... you see where I am
going.

~~~
rolph
YUP exactly! More or less, ive already gone there. Anyone in range that signs
on can read from the library.

------
james_pm
What a click-baity, biased headline.

