That was a really, really good move in hindsight.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of M Vieni
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2017 9:24 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and
Stored It on European Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated
Now this is real resistance!
Miriam
Schlanger writes: "As Donald Trump was sworn into office as the new
president of the US on Jan. 20, a group of around 60 programmers and
scientists were gathered in the Department of Information Studies building
at the University of California-Los Angeles, harvesting government data."
They're archiving everything. (photo: Quartz)
Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored It on European
Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated By Zoë Schlanger, Quartz
22 January 17
As Donald Trump was sworn into office as the new president of the US on
Jan. 20, a group of around 60 programmers and scientists were gathered in
the Department of Information Studies building at the University of
California-Los Angeles, harvesting government data.
A spreadsheet detailed their targets: Webpages dedicated to the Department
of Energys solar power initiative, Energy Information Administration data
sets that compared fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and fuel cell
research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to name a few out of
hundreds.
Many of the programmers who showed up at UCLA for the event had day jobs as
IT consultants or data managers at startups; others were undergrad computer
science majors. The scientists in attendance, including ecologists, lab
managers, and oceanographers, came from universities all over Southern
California. A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like
this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country:
Volunteer data rescue events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago,
Indianapolis, and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape
hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov, NASA.gov, DOE.gov, and
whitehouse.gov, uploading them to the Internet Archive. Another is planned
for early February at New York University.
Hackers, librarians, scientists, and archivists had been working around the
clock, at these events and in the days between, to download as much federal
climate and environment data off government websites as possible before
Trump took office. But suddenly, at exactly noon on Friday as Trump was
sworn in, and just as the UCLA event kicked off, some of their fears began
to come true: The climate change-related pages on whitehouse.gov
disappeared. Its typical of incoming administrations to take down some of
their predecessors pages, but scrubbing all mentions of climate change is a
clear indication of the Trump administrations position on climate science.
Were having a heart attack, said Laurie Allen on Friday afternoon. Allen
is the assistant director for digital scholarship in the University of
Pennsylvania libraries and the technical lead on a recent data-rescuing
event there. In the last four days I think weve been working 22 hours a
day, because we were hearing that these precise changes were going to
happen.
I wish we had been wrong about our concerns. But this is what we internally
had predicted and prepared for, added Bethany Wiggin, the director of the
environmental humanities program at Penn and another organizer of the
data-rescuing event.
Over the first 100 days of the new administration, a volunteer team of
programmers will be scanning government websites and comparing them to the
archived, pre-Trump versions, to check for changes. Well be letting people
know what the changes exactly are. We hope to produce a weekly report on
changes, Wiggin says, perhaps in the form of a newsletter.
While Wiggin and Allen say the changes to whitehouse.gov are disconcerting,
they also note they are small potatoes compared with what could come next:
the large government data sets related to climate change and environmental
health that scientists use for research. For example, theres a massive
Environmental Protection Agency database of air quality monitoring data that
might become a target of Trump-appointed EPA administrator Scott Pruitts
office, based on Pruitts history of suing the EPA to roll back air
pollution regulations.
Thats where the data rescuing hackathons come in: The volunteer programmers
at each event have been writing custom scripts to harvest the bigger, more
complicated federal data sets, too. And theyre sharing the scripts with
each other. These events build onto each other. We might use tools that
were built at other events, says Irene Pasquetto, one of the organizers of
the UCLA event.
Large data sets are being organized and uploaded to datarefuge.org, a
website based on a version of the open-source data portal software Ckan,
customized by Allen. All the various data-rescue hackathons are using the
site for data storage, and hope it will act as an alternative repository for
pre-Trump federal information during the new administration.
There will, thanks to Michael Riedyk, CEO of the Canadian data-archiving
company Page Freezer, also be a copy stored outside the US.
The night before the inauguration, Riedyk was reading an article online
about the Penn data-rescuing event, and thought it wouldnt hurt also host
that data in a second location, and he had just the spot in mind. His
company offered monthly subscriptions to companies and government agencies
who wanted their web pages archived on a daily basis. Plus, it had servers
in Europe.
We built this huge archiving cloud that crawls websites to preserve them,
either to comply with regulation or for legal protection, Riedyk says. I
thought, wow, we have that complete infrastructure in place. So Riedyk got
in touch with Wiggin, who helped organize the Philadelphia event, and
offered his services for free. I said, We can archive these for you, and
figure out how to open up to the public later.
Wiggin sent him back 30,000 science-related government web pages and the
domain names of 150 complete websites that participants in data-rescue
events had identified as possibly under threat by the new administration, or
of vital use to researchers.
By the next day, shortly after Trump took office, Riedyks team was almost
done. Weve captured a significant portion, he says. I expect well have
everything on that list by today or tomorrow.
From there, his company will use web crawlers to scan each page on a weekly
basis. Page Freezers proprietary software will allow them to see if
anything changes. We have all kinds of really cool tools to highlight what
changedwe can see exactly how people have edited or deleted. So if the
Trump administration alters a page on, say, a US Environmental Protection
Agency website, Page Freezer will know.
Page Freezer has three data centers, one in the US, one in Europe, and one
in Canada; the US government data will be archived on their European
servers. Thats where we had most of our capacity available right now,
Riedyk says. But it could also put the information out of reach of the US
government: In a 2016, a US appeals court ruled that Microsoft did not have
to turn over to the Department of Justice a customers emails that were
stored on a server in Dublin, Ireland. The second circuit court said that
warrants obtained under the Stored Communications Act, which governs
electronic records, are limited to searches within US borders. Thats not to
say the law would not be challenged again, but having a copy of these key
scientific datasets stored in Europe should make getting rid of them much
more difficult.
Meanwhile, as more and more data rescuing events bubble up across the
country, the work is getting easier, says Britt Paris, a PhD student at UCLA
and another organizer of the event there. Strategies for workflow and
data-scraping best-practices are being handed down, one event to the other.
I feel like we have a lot of support, like were part of a wider network,
Paris said. Theres a sense of going forward together.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
They're archiving everything. (photo: Quartz)
https://qz.com/891201/hackers-were-downloading-government-climate-data-and-s
toring-it-on-european-servers-as-trump-was-being-inaugurated/https://qz.com/
891201/hackers-were-downloading-government-climate-data-and-storing-it-on-eu
ropean-servers-as-trump-was-being-inaugurated/
Hackers Downloaded US Government Climate Data and Stored It on European
Servers as Trump Was Being Inaugurated By Zoë Schlanger, Quartz
22 January 17
s Donald Trump was sworn into office as the new president of the US on Jan.
20, a group of around 60 programmers and scientists were gathered in the
Department of Information Studies building at the University of
California-Los Angeles, harvesting government data.
A spreadsheet detailed their targets: Webpages dedicated to the Department
of Energys solar power initiative, Energy Information Administration data
sets that compared fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, and fuel cell
research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to name a few out of
hundreds.
Many of the programmers who showed up at UCLA for the event had day jobs as
IT consultants or data managers at startups; others were undergrad computer
science majors. The scientists in attendance, including ecologists, lab
managers, and oceanographers, came from universities all over Southern
California. A motley crew of data enthusiasts who assemble for projects like
this is becoming something of a trend at universities across the country:
Volunteer data rescue events in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago,
Indianapolis, and Michigan over the last few weeks have managed to scrape
hundreds of thousands of pages off of EPA.gov, NASA.gov, DOE.gov, and
whitehouse.gov, uploading them to the Internet Archive. Another is planned
for early February at New York University.
Hackers, librarians, scientists, and archivists had been working around the
clock, at these events and in the days between, to download as much federal
climate and environment data off government websites as possible before
Trump took office. But suddenly, at exactly noon on Friday as Trump was
sworn in, and just as the UCLA event kicked off, some of their fears began
to come true: The climate change-related pages on whitehouse.gov
disappeared. Its typical of incoming administrations to take down some of
their predecessors pages, but scrubbing all mentions of climate change is a
clear indication of the Trump administrations position on climate science.
Were having a heart attack, said Laurie Allen on Friday afternoon. Allen
is the assistant director for digital scholarship in the University of
Pennsylvania libraries and the technical lead on a recent data-rescuing
event there. In the last four days I think weve been working 22 hours a
day, because we were hearing that these precise changes were going to
happen.
I wish we had been wrong about our concerns. But this is what we internally
had predicted and prepared for, added Bethany Wiggin, the director of the
environmental humanities program at Penn and another organizer of the
data-rescuing event.
Over the first 100 days of the new administration, a volunteer team of
programmers will be scanning government websites and comparing them to the
archived, pre-Trump versions, to check for changes. Well be letting people
know what the changes exactly are. We hope to produce a weekly report on
changes, Wiggin says, perhaps in the form of a newsletter.
While Wiggin and Allen say the changes to whitehouse.gov are disconcerting,
they also note they are small potatoes compared with what could come next:
the large government data sets related to climate change and environmental
health that scientists use for research. For example, theres a massive
Environmental Protection Agency database of air quality monitoring data that
might become a target of Trump-appointed EPA administrator Scott Pruitts
office, based on Pruitts history of suing the EPA to roll back air
pollution regulations.
Thats where the data rescuing hackathons come in: The volunteer programmers
at each event have been writing custom scripts to harvest the bigger, more
complicated federal data sets, too. And theyre sharing the scripts with
each other. These events build onto each other. We might use tools that
were built at other events, says Irene Pasquetto, one of the organizers of
the UCLA event.
Large data sets are being organized and uploaded to datarefuge.org, a
website based on a version of the open-source data portal software Ckan,
customized by Allen. All the various data-rescue hackathons are using the
site for data storage, and hope it will act as an alternative repository for
pre-Trump federal information during the new administration.
There will, thanks to Michael Riedyk, CEO of the Canadian data-archiving
company Page Freezer, also be a copy stored outside the US.
The night before the inauguration, Riedyk was reading an article online
about the Penn data-rescuing event, and thought it wouldnt hurt also host
that data in a second location, and he had just the spot in mind. His
company offered monthly subscriptions to companies and government agencies
who wanted their web pages archived on a daily basis. Plus, it had servers
in Europe.
We built this huge archiving cloud that crawls websites to preserve them,
either to comply with regulation or for legal protection, Riedyk says. I
thought, wow, we have that complete infrastructure in place. So Riedyk got
in touch with Wiggin, who helped organize the Philadelphia event, and
offered his services for free. I said, We can archive these for you, and
figure out how to open up to the public later.
Wiggin sent him back 30,000 science-related government web pages and the
domain names of 150 complete websites that participants in data-rescue
events had identified as possibly under threat by the new administration, or
of vital use to researchers.
By the next day, shortly after Trump took office, Riedyks team was almost
done. Weve captured a significant portion, he says. I expect well have
everything on that list by today or tomorrow.
From there, his company will use web crawlers to scan each page on a weekly
basis. Page Freezers proprietary software will allow them to see if
anything changes. We have all kinds of really cool tools to highlight what
changedwe can see exactly how people have edited or deleted. So if the
Trump administration alters a page on, say, a US Environmental Protection
Agency website, Page Freezer will know.
Page Freezer has three data centers, one in the US, one in Europe, and one
in Canada; the US government data will be archived on their European
servers. Thats where we had most of our capacity available right now,
Riedyk says. But it could also put the information out of reach of the US
government: In a 2016, a US appeals court ruled that Microsoft did not have
to turn over to the Department of Justice a customers emails that were
stored on a server in Dublin, Ireland. The second circuit court said that
warrants obtained under the Stored Communications Act, which governs
electronic records, are limited to searches within US borders. Thats not to
say the law would not be challenged again, but having a copy of these key
scientific datasets stored in Europe should make getting rid of them much
more difficult.
Meanwhile, as more and more data rescuing events bubble up across the
country, the work is getting easier, says Britt Paris, a PhD student at UCLA
and another organizer of the event there. Strategies for workflow and
data-scraping best-practices are being handed down, one event to the other.
I feel like we have a lot of support, like were part of a wider network,
Paris said. Theres a sense of going forward together.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
