The FBI is attempting to track down the identity of the owner of Archive.today and its numerous mirrors, like Archive.is and Archive.ph. As reported by 404 Media, the FBI subpoena, which was posted on the official Archive.today X account, was sent to web domain registrar Tucows on October 30th demanding the “customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address” associated with Archive.today.
The subpoena also requests telephone records, payment information, internet session info, network addresses, and even the services the site’s owner has used, such as email or cloud computing services. It goes on to say that this info “relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI,” but it doesn’t reference a specific crime.
Archive.today has been around since 2012, but the identity of the site’s owner remains unconfirmed. Someone who goes by the common Russian name, or possibly pseudonym, “Denis Petrov” from Prague, Czech Republic registered the original domain of the site, but little else is known about who that person is. The site is commonly used to dodge paywalls, similar to 12ft.io, which the News/Media Alliance successfully had taken down earlier this year, claiming it “offered illegal circumvention technology” to access copyrighted content without paying for it.
