India bans Wayback Machine, makes it harder to catch liars on the web
With the Wayback Machine blocked, Indians will find it difficult to catch liars on the Internet.
In a move that has to be seen as nothing but an attempt to obfuscate information, the Indian government has ordered blocking of Wayback Machine hosted at archive.org/web. Unlike many porn sites, torrent sites and file hosts blocked in India, the Wayback Machine is a web tool that seemingly has public utility. This makes the ban strange. For now the blocking of the internet archive is sporadic with some ISPs blocking the website in some regions while in many other instances users getting through to the site.
Update: Finally, there is some information about why the Wayback Machine aka Internet Archives has been blocked in India. It has reportedly happened on the orders of Madras High Court, which was acting on a plea filed by the distributors of two movies. The court was approached by distributors of Jab Harry Met Sejal and Lipstick Under Burka seeking relief from people who they called pirates. The distributors gave the court a list of URLs that they wanted blocked in India and one of the URL in the list was archive.org aka Wayback Machine.
Update: While the ban is real, there is no explanation or communication from the government about it. The Wayback Machine reportedly reached out to both the Department of Telecom (DoT) and MeITY but has not received any response. "Multiple attempts to contact the DoT and MeitY (DeitY was the agency that ultimately ended up responding to us regarding the previous block) have gone unanswered thus far (we first tried to reach out to them about 22 hours ago). Obviously, we are disappointed and concerned by this situation and are very eager to understand why it's happening and see full access restored to archive.org," the organisation said in statement.
With the Wayback Machine blocked, Indians will find it difficult to catch liars on the Internet. It may even hit India's attempt to root out corruption, doublespeak and is likely to make a number of government bodies less accountable to citizens.
A large number of users are getting the message shown for blocked sites when they are trying to access the Wayback Machine. The message reads that the website has been blocked on the directions of Department of Telecom. The block on the Wayback Machine wasfirst noticed by Medianama.
Wayback Machine, if you are not familiar, works like an archive of the internet. Everyday it crawls through millions of webpages, similar to how Google does it, and then saves snapshots of the websites as it saw them. This allows web users to go back to a particular date and then check out a specific website or web page the way it looked on that date.
Although the Wayback Machine is a very useful and valuable tool for public, it is not particularly liked by government bodies because it allows Internet users to catch lies. For example, on a particular date a government department may publish a circular. In future if it withdraws the circular, something that happens quite frequently whenever the government has something to hide, it could still be found on the Wayback Machine.
In recent days a number of web users have pointed out the disconnect between what the UIDAI, the agency behind Aadhaar, noted earlier on its website and what it later did. To prove there was a mismatch between the talk and deed of the agency, many internet users relied on Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is also useful in keeping a record of the promises made by politicians and organisations. For example the news reports from a particular date, even when those reports have been deleted by the organisations that wrote them, could be highlighted through Wayback Machine to showcase how a government wasn't keeping its promise.
Essentially, what the Wayback Machine does is that it makes lying in public difficult. It is possible that people in the Department of Telecommunications don't like this kind of functionality that Indian citizens can use to find people and organisations who tend to lie.
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