Credit: Monty Rakusen / Getty
Last Thursday, January 30, the niema Moshiri bioinformatian received a late evening message from a long-standing collaborator, the pressing to safeguard the website of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At the time, rumors circulated that the public health agency, which follows disease epidemics and made its data accessible to the public, would begin to delete the pages of its website, in response to decrees issued by President Donald Trump ordering government ministries to withdraw public information on gender and diversity.
Moshiri, who is based at the University of California in San Diego, and a self -proclaimed “data hob” which creates backups of his personal videos and online receipts and invoices, was happy to help you. “I never thought I should do it for information pages of the federal government,” he said.
During last week, certain websites of the American federal government containing significant data sets and information on public health and demography, such as global programs to combat HIV and national surveys on chronic diseases, have been deleted. Some have been reintegrated, others not. “It was a bit shocking for me that they would simply delete the annoying pages,” said Moshiri.
Moshiri is one of the dozens of researchers in the United States and rushing around the world to seize public information on the websites of the American federal government before it is altered or disappears. “Many people have made similar parallel efforts, especially in their own areas of expertise,” said virologist Angela Rasmussen, based at Saskatchewan University in Saskatoon, Canada, who was the collaborator who sent a message in Moshiri. She stayed up until 2 am last Friday, manually downloading data sets, as on surveillance of the flu. Having created these backups, the researchers find ways to make it publicly accessible, she adds.
The CDC and the United States Ministry of Health and Social Services, which is the CDC parental agency, say that all changes in their websites comply with Trump’s decrees.
Global effort
During the weekend, Moshiri came into contact with Charles Gaba, a health policy and a data analyst based near Detroit, Michigan.
Moshiri has helped GABA create an alphabetical list of each CDC web link – amounting to more than 7,000 pages, which Gaba has manually redirected to the Wayback machine, a service maintained by the Internet Archives of the Organization in Non -profit, based in San Francisco, California, which regularly arms web pages, including government websites such as that of the CDC. Gaba then published the whole list on his blog. “It took a few days,” says Gaba. “A large part is vital, and you do not know what has been, what is still there, which is not there.” GABA has since published a similar list of the entire Food and Drug Administration of the United States (FDA) website, organized by Subject.
On its hard drive, Moshiri now has backups from the CDC website, and all CDC data sets, the FDA and other government websites. Some of them have downloaded himself and others were downloaded and shared by others online. It is also safeguarding the website of the American Department of Agriculture – all these sites represent hundreds of thousands of files and more than 130 gigabytes of uncompressed data, and yet all could adapt to a USB flash player . “It’s quite tiny,” he says.
Moshiri did not share its backups publicly. If her university agrees that she belongs to her role as teachers, Moshiri wants to publish an exact intact copy of the CDC website. And its long -term objective is to safeguard all websites of the federal government. “I have 100 storage teraoctes under my office. In theory, I could stick it all. »»
Kendra Albert, a lawyer in the law firm of the technologies of the public interest and the Albert Sellars LLP media in Philadelphia, affirms that the works produced by the employees of the federal government in the context of their employment are in the public domain. In general, it is legal to download sets of government data, to make backups of government websites and to share them, they say. In circumstances where the material protected by copyright is included in this data, making copies and sharing it often falls under the doctrine of fair use if it is made for research, plea or as a Historical file to show what the site looked like in a previous date, says Albert.
Internet archives also support an initiative aimed at archiving government web pages at the start and the end of each US presidential term. James Jacobs, librarian at the University of Stanford, who works at the end of the quarter, the web archives hope that it could become a central place where the public is accessible by the archives of scientists.