DDoS Attack Cripples Archive.org: The Next Information War Front?

Nov 04, 2024

Web archives — which, as the name implies, archive webpages at snapshots in time — serve as an invaluable tool for independent journalists, as they offer a window into information the governing authorities and their apparatchiks in corporate media would rather memory-hole.

As just one example among myriad, without web archiving, we might now know that the CDC quietly tried to slip a new definition of “vaccine” under the public’s nose so as to allow the mRNA shots it was pimping at the time into the framework. Had the previous definition remained, they would not have qualified as “vaccines” because, unlike every actual vaccine in history, they do not confer immunity.

Via Miami Herald September 27, 2021 (emphasis added):

“Social media is calling bluff on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for modifying its definition of the words “vaccine” and “vaccination” on its website.
Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”
The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”
Some people have speculated that the unannounced changes were the CDC’s attempt to hide the fact COVID-19 vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing coronavirus infection. U.S. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky said in a popular tweet the CDC has “been busy at the Ministry of Truth.”
However, a CDC spokesperson told McClatchy News the “slight changes in wording over time … haven’t impacted the overall definition.””

Is it mere coincidence that the premier web archiving service on the web gets taken out of commission by what is clearly a well-orchestrated and resourced attack just days before a hugely controversial election?

Anything is possible, of course, but the incentives for the technocrats to incapacitate the infrastructure that independent journalists and average people rely on to chronicle and archive events in real time are all there.

Via Brownstone Institute (emphasis added):

“The service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes... In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely…
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions…
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.”

With dystopian fiction as our frequent guidepost to understanding what is happening here in the real world, we turn to our old friends, the pigs (as metaphor for despots) of Animal Farm and their “evolution” of the Seven Commandments, originally intended to be immutable.

Via Literature Wise (emphasis added):

“The Seven Commandments - written on the barn wall - are the basic principles of animalism and described originally as "unalterable laws" by which the animals were to live. They were meant to keep the animals equal and to ensure that all animals were true to their own nature. Over time, the commandments begin to change; they have addendums unexplainably added to them. The animals see what the commandments say and question their own memories…
All pretence of "unalterable laws" is abandoned and the Commandments are replaced by the meaningless slogan:
"All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others."”

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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