The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of a criminal investigation, though it does not provide any details about what alleged crime is being investigated. Archive.today is also popularly known by several of its mirrors, including archive.is and archive.ph.

The subpoena, which was posted on X by archive.today on October 30, was sent by the FBI to Tucows, a popular Canadian domain registrar. It demands that Tucows give the FBI the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” and other information about the “customer behind archive.today.”

“THE INFORMATION SOUGHT THROUGH THIS SUBPOENA RELATES TO A FEDERAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FBI,” the subpoena says. “YOUR COMPANY IS REQUIRED TO FURNISH THIS INFORMATION. YOU ARE REQUESTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA INDEFINITELY AS ANY SUCH DISCLOSURE COULD INTERFERE WITH AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION AND ENFORCEMENT OF THE LAW.”

The subpoena also requests “Local and long distance telephone connection records (examples include: incoming and outgoing calls, push-to-talk, and SMS/MMS connection records); Means and source of payment (including any credit card or bank account number); Records of session times and duration for Internet connectivity; Telephone or Instrument number (including IMEI, IMSI, UFMI, and ESN) and/or other customer/subscriber number(s) used to identify customer/subscriber, including any temporarily assigned network address (including Internet Protocol addresses); Types of service used (e.g. push-to-talk, text, three-way calling, email services, cloud computing, gaming services, etc.)”

The subpoena was issued on October 30 and was reported Wednesday by the German news outlet Heise. The FBI, Archive.today, and Tucows did not respond to a request for comment.

The site, which is known by both archive.today, archive.is, or any number of other mirrors, started in the early 2010s but rose to prominence during the GamerGate movement.

GamerGaters would take snapshots of articles using archive.is in order to avoid sending traffic directly to the websites that published them. They also used the service to document changes to articles. The site has since become a widely used archiving tool and internet resource, with hundreds of millions of pages saved. It is often used to bypass website paywalls, but it is also used to save snapshots of articles or government websites that are likely to change or be deleted. It is still also widely used to avoid sending traffic to the original publisher of content.

A 2013 blog post on archive.today explains that once a page has been archived, it is very difficult to delete, and that the only way to get a page deleted from the site is to email the webmaster there: “It would be ridiculous if the site which goal is to fight the dead link problem has dead links itself.”

Very little is known about the person or people who work on archive.today, though there have been numerous attempts to identify the webmasters. The most interesting is this article on a site called Gyrovague, whose crawling through various archive.today blogs and web presences suggests “it’s a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”

A FAQ page, which has not been updated since 2013, states the site “is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it.” A post on the site’s blog from 2021 says “it is doomed to die at any moment.”

About the author

Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was previously the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.