The FBI has subpoenaed Tucows for records tied to archive.today, seeking to identify its mysterious owner in a federal criminal investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a subpoena to Tucows, the Canadian domain registrar for the archiving website archive.today, demanding information that could reveal the identity of its owner.
The subpoena, which archive.today posted on X on October 30, describes the request as part of a “federal criminal investigation.” It instructs Tucows to provide “customer or subscriber name, address of service, billing address,” and other identifying details related to the domain’s ownership. The document warns that disclosing the subpoena’s existence “could interfere with an ongoing investigation and enforcement of the law.”
According to 404 Media, the subpoena also seeks “telephone connection records, payment methods, session times, and IP addresses.” The FBI, Tucows, and archive.today have not responded to requests for comment.
The site, also known as archive.is and archive.ph, gained traction in the early 2010s and became prominent during the GamerGate movement. It allows users to capture snapshots of web pages, often used to bypass paywalls or preserve content likely to be altered or deleted.
A 2013 blog post by the site’s webmaster stated, “It would be ridiculous if the site which goal is to fight the dead link problem has dead links itself.” The operator remains unidentified, though previous investigations suggest it may be “a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”
Archive.today, privately funded and minimally maintained, has preserved hundreds of millions of pages but remains, according to its 2021 blog post, “doomed to die at any moment.”