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Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Independent Databases Archiving the Trump Administration
A January 2025 screenshot of the Trump White House's 404 error message for a web page that is no longer active. Credit - TIME President Donald Trump has promised Americans 'radical transparency'—but his government has taken a number of steps that observers say make it anything but the self-described 'most transparent Administration in history!' In his first term, which the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation described as 'allergic to transparency,' the White House stopped releasing visitor logs, censored or rejected a record percentage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and refused to release his tax returns. So far, the second-term Trump Administration has scrubbed federal websites, limited reporters' access, and used disappearing-message apps for high-level communications that typically should be retained for posterity. The Associated Press reported last week that 'Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. President,' and the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the Trump Administration 'is eroding the information environment in ways this country has never seen.' Most recently, this week the White House removed official transcripts of the President's remarks, which are now only available as videos—a departure from a common practice across Democratic and Republican administrations over decades. The only transcript that is now available on the White House website is Trump's inaugural address. 'You must be truly f-cking stupid if you think we're not transparent,' White House communications director Steven Cheung told HuffPost when asked about the latest move. In the void of official archives, a number of independent record-keepers have taken matters into their own hands, offering the public a cache of data and documentation to sift and search through without fear of sudden removal. Still, these mostly collect only previously-made public records, and transparency advocates remain concerned about those that the public may never see. Here are some of the databases available. What started out in 1999 as a project by then-graduate student Gerhard Peters and professor John Woolley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for students of political science has since turned into a valuable comprehensive digital repository of presidential public documents dating back to George Washington. The nonprofit, nonpartisan American Presidency Project hosts copies of Trump's speeches and executive orders, social media posts, press pool reports, media interviews, and more—from both his terms as well as his campaigns and transition periods. Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab, which developed the web-archiving tool, released in February a new archive of more than 300,000 data sets from the U.S. government's repository of open data. 'We've built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,' the lab said in announcing the project. The Data Rescue Project is a collaboration between organizations like IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. The project, which started out in February on a Google Doc, aims to 'serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points' for public U.S. governmental data that it deems 'currently at risk.' Data it harvests, including from government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Education, is maintained in the searchable archive DataLumos, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's crowd-sourced repository hosted by the University of Michigan. Started in 2017 by Virginia husband and wife Bill Frischling and Jennifer Canty to empower the public to factcheck Trump's statements for themselves, collects videos of Trump's speeches, as well as press gaggles and other appearances. 'How could you argue something is not true if you could see not only what this person said but the entire context around it?' Frischling told BuzzFeed News. The database was acquired by FiscalNote and is now hosted by FiscalNote's policy news site Roll Call. It also has a collection of Trump's tweets and social media posts, going as far back as 2009, as well as the President's public schedule and emailed press releases from the White House. Formed in 2016 to document changes to 'vulnerable' federal environmental data, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaboration of professionals advocating for environmental awareness. Its website-monitoring team created a tracker for changes to environment-related federal pages. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has purged information or text related to the climate crisis on many government websites. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that provides users free access to its expansive digital library. Since beginning in 1996, the archive has a collection of more than 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and a million software programs. 'Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,' it says on its site. In 2017, it launched the Trump Archive, which collects 'TV news shows containing debates, speeches, interviews, rallies, and other reporting related to Donald Trump, before his first presidency and throughout subsequent years.' But anybody can contribute. Described by the New Yorker as 'a tech-support professional' in Kansas, a man identified only as Andrew—who uses the moniker Grumpy—began downloading videos from federal agencies on February 1 in response to takedowns by the Trump Administration. The videos are available on his Internet Archive account, Grumpy System. The Internet Archive also operates the Wayback Machine, a tool that preserves timestamped snapshots of websites. Like the Internet Archive's other databases, individuals can contribute to the Wayback Machine, too. Its director told NPR that six weeks into Trump's second term, some 73,000 government web pages (and counting) were cataloged before being expunged, including reportedly the only copy of the House Jan. 6 Committee's interactive timeline of the 2021 Capitol Riot. The Wayback Machine has also hosted since 2008 the End of Term Web Archive, which 'collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.' AI-powered speech-to-text company Rev hosts a free Transcript Library that includes searchable transcripts of Trump's public appearances going back years. Trump's Truth, a project by the Never-Trump-Republican founded nonprofit group Defending Democracy Together, archives all of Trump's posts on his platform TRUTH Social. While Trump's TRUTH Social posts are publicly available, the Trump's Truth site warns that the President's posts on his own platform 'may be deleted at any time.' The archive checks for new posts 'every few minutes' and includes video transcription and image descriptions to enable greater search ability. 'We believe this is an essential part of the historical record, and that it must be preserved for its educational, journalistic and research value,' the site says. Contact us at letters@
Time Magazine
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
As White House Purges Public Records, These Independent Databases Are Keeping Their Own Trump Archives
President Donald Trump has promised Americans 'radical transparency'—but his government has taken a number of steps that observers say make it anything but the self-described ' most transparent Administration in history! ' In his first term, which the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation described as ' allergic to transparency,' the White House stopped releasing visitor logs, censored or rejected a record percentage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and refused to release his tax returns. So far, the second-term Trump Administration has scrubbed federal websites, limited reporters' access, and used disappearing-message apps for high-level communications that typically should be retained for posterity. The Associated Press reported last week that ' Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. President,' and the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the Trump Administration ' is eroding the information environment in ways this country has never seen.' Most recently, this week the White House removed official transcripts of the President's remarks, which are now only available as videos—a departure from a common practice across Democratic and Republican administrations over decades. The only transcript that is now available on the White House website is Trump's inaugural address. 'You must be truly f-cking stupid if you think we're not transparent,' White House communications director Steven Cheung told HuffPost when asked about the latest move. In the void of official archives, a number of independent record-keepers have taken matters into their own hands, offering the public a cache of data and documentation to sift and search through without fear of sudden removal. Still, these mostly collect only previously-made public records, and transparency advocates remain concerned about those that the public may never see. Here are some of the databases available. American Presidency Project What started out in 1999 as a project by then-graduate student Gerhard Peters and professor John Woolley at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for students of political science has since turned into a valuable comprehensive digital repository of presidential public documents dating back to George Washington. The nonprofit, nonpartisan American Presidency Project hosts copies of Trump's speeches and executive orders, social media posts, press pool reports, media interviews, and more—from both his terms as well as his campaigns and transition periods. Archive Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab, which developed the web-archiving tool, released in February a new archive of more than 300,000 data sets from the U.S. government's repository of open data. 'We've built this project on our long-standing commitment to preserving government records and making public information available to everyone,' the lab said in announcing the project. Data Rescue Project The Data Rescue Project is a collaboration between organizations like IASSIST, RDAP, and members of the Data Curation Network. The project, which started out in February on a Google Doc, aims to 'serve as a clearinghouse for data rescue-related efforts and data access points' for public U.S. governmental data that it deems 'currently at risk.' Data it harvests, including from government agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Education, is maintained in the searchable archive DataLumos, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research's crowd-sourced repository hosted by the University of Michigan. Started in 2017 by Virginia husband and wife Bill Frischling and Jennifer Canty to empower the public to factcheck Trump's statements for themselves, collects videos of Trump's speeches, as well as press gaggles and other appearances. 'How could you argue something is not true if you could see not only what this person said but the entire context around it?' Frischling told BuzzFeed News. The database was acquired by FiscalNote and is now hosted by FiscalNote's policy news site Roll Call. It also has a collection of Trump's tweets and social media posts, going as far back as 2009, as well as the President's public schedule and emailed press releases from the White House. Federal Environmental Web Tracker by EDGI Formed in 2016 to document changes to 'vulnerable' federal environmental data, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaboration of professionals advocating for environmental awareness. Its website-monitoring team created a tracker for changes to environment-related federal pages. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has purged information or text related to the climate crisis on many government websites. Internet Archive The Internet Archive is a nonprofit that provides users free access to its expansive digital library. Since beginning in 1996, the archive has a collection of more than 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, 15 million audio recordings, 10.6 million videos, 4.8 million images, and a million software programs. 'Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge,' it says on its site. In 2017, it launched the Trump Archive, which collects 'TV news shows containing debates, speeches, interviews, rallies, and other reporting related to Donald Trump, before his first presidency and throughout subsequent years.' But anybody can contribute. Described by the New Yorker as 'a tech-support professional' in Kansas, a man identified only as Andrew—who uses the moniker Grumpy—began downloading videos from federal agencies on February 1 in response to takedowns by the Trump Administration. The videos are available on his Internet Archive account, Grumpy System. The Internet Archive also operates the Wayback Machine, a tool that preserves timestamped snapshots of websites. Like the Internet Archive's other databases, individuals can contribute to the Wayback Machine, too. Its director told NPR that six weeks into Trump's second term, some 73,000 government web pages (and counting) were cataloged before being expunged, including reportedly the only copy of the House Jan. 6 Committee's interactive timeline of the 2021 Capitol Riot. The Wayback Machine has also hosted since 2008 the End of Term Web Archive, which 'collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations.' Rev AI-powered speech-to-text company Rev hosts a free Transcript Library that includes searchable transcripts of Trump's public appearances going back years. Trump's Truth Trump's Truth, a project by the Never-Trump-Republican founded nonprofit group Defending Democracy Together, archives all of Trump's posts on his platform TRUTH Social. While Trump's TRUTH Social posts are publicly available, the Trump's Truth site warns that the President's posts on his own platform 'may be deleted at any time.' The archive checks for new posts 'every few minutes' and includes video transcription and image descriptions to enable greater search ability. 'We believe this is an essential part of the historical record, and that it must be preserved for its educational, journalistic and research value,' the site says.
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Nina Jankowicz's Defense of Government Censors Is Based on Misinformation
Nina Jankowicz is the former director of the Department of Homeland Security's Disinformation Governance Board, an entity that purported to advise the Biden administration on how best to counter online misinformation but was shuttered after drawing the ire of conservatives and libertarians. Like so many other purported disinfo experts, Jankowicz's record of identifying actual lies is decidedly mixed: She had dutifully joined the intelligence community and much of the mainstream media, for instance, in wrongly asserting that the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story was disinformation peddled by Russia. She personally expressed the view that the straightforward explanation—Hunter Biden left his laptop at a repair shop—was a "fairy tale." Oops. But like so many other former government intelligence officials who were fundamentally wrong about pivotal issues pertaining to their area of expertise, Jankowicz is fated to fail upward. She is now the president of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting transparency, though the group does not disclose its sources of funding. That intriguing policy—some would say execrable hypocrisy—was noted by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R–Wash.) during a fiery congressional subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. Jankowicz testified alongside one of her most ardent critics, the independent journalist Matt Taibbi, whose work exposing the federal government's efforts to compel social media companies to censor contrarian speech was a major driver of negative attention to projects like the Disinformation Governance Board. Taibbi's Twitter Files (as well as similar projects, like Reason's Facebook Files) demonstrated that aggressive moderation of dissident opinions online was not a choice freely made by social media companies—it was forced on them by government agents who were themselves misinformed about the facts. Jankowicz defended the Sunlight Foundation's lack of transparency on grounds that she has personally faced bullying as a result of her antidisinfo advocacy, and she wished to spare her backers from such a fate. She also tore into Taibbi, accusing him of failing to understand the implications of the information he uncovered and the social media censorship stories he had reported on. "Mr. Taibbi said when he was first searching through the so-called Twitter Files, he didn't know what he was looking at," said Jankowicz. "Well, he still doesn't. Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works." That's a bold claim from someone who bought into a conspiracy theory about the Hunter Biden laptop story. Jankowicz proceeded to flatly assert that the State Department's Global Engagement Center, charged with countering foreign propaganda, was never engaged in anything approaching censorship. This claim is abjectly false and collapses under scrutiny. At issue are two independent antidisinfo organizations, NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, that received funding from the State Department. In her testimony, Jankowicz acknowledged that these organizations were federally funded, although she defended the grants as focused on combatting Chinese government propaganda rather than encouraging censorship of American media entities. We will return to that in a moment. Jankowicz subsequently took issue with the idea that NewsGuard was biased against right-leaning news sources, noting that several "conservative" organizations including The Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Reason (i.e., this magazine) had received favorable evaluations. Neither Reason nor Cato identifies as conservative, of course; alas, this is precisely the sort of sloppiness one has by now come to expect from the antidisinfo experts. It is true, in any case, that NewsGuard favorably evaluated Reason. But the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) is another matter entirely. This organization—a British nonprofit, backed by the State Department—listed Reason as one of the 10 "riskiest online news outlets" and warned advertisers against appearing on the website. The GDI's stated rationale for this purported danger was inscrutable; the disinfo cops accused Reason of having unclear authorship policies, which is simply not true. Reason was far from the only disfavored news source: The GDI targeted the New York Post, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Wire, Blaze Media, The American Conservative, and the Washington Examiner. The Examiner subsequently took a closer look at the GDI's operations and determined that its missives to advertisers to avoid "risky" libertarian and conservative news sites were partly based on the idea that these outlets were promoting COVID-19 misinformation. Specifically, the GDI was shaming these websites for including commentary that COVID-19 may have leaked from a Chinese lab. This theory, labeled a "coronavirus conspiracy" by the GDI, is now judged by the FBI, the CIA, and the Energy Department to be the most plausible explanation for the pandemic's origins. Oops, again. But wait a minute: Wasn't Jankowicz defending the State Department's decision to fund these antidisinfo organizations on grounds that they were merely using taxpayer dollars to counter Chinese government propaganda? The GDI tried to suppress the idea that COVID-19 could have emerged from a Chinese lab under lax safety conditions, a disaster that was subsequently hidden by Chinese officials. Given that millions of people died all over the world as a result of the pandemic, any organizations running cover for the Chinese government on this topic are effectively complicit in the Chinese government's most essential propaganda campaign. So much for the State Department paying disinfo cops to counter foreign misinformation. When it came to COVID-19's origins, the GDI enforced the misinformation. And Jankowicz is still defending it. The post Nina Jankowicz's Defense of Government Censors Is Based on Misinformation appeared first on
