How Hackers Are Trying to Safeguard Climate Change Data from the Trump Administration
As protesters and supporters of the Trump administration took to the streets over the weekend, we saw growing unrest in the coded, .gov corner of the Internet. Over the past two months, following the election of fact-adverse Donald Trump, hackers have been systematically archiving government records, Wired reports, focusing specifically on data relating to climate change.
The victory of Donald Trump, climate change denier and general threat to science, spurred a series of data-rescuing hackathons, with scientists, hackers, and archivists crawling through webpages they felt were at-risk-including the Department of Energy, the EPA, and NOAA-looking for downloadable files to archive as quickly as possible, before the new administration can erase them. And in the days just before the Inauguration, Inside the EPA reported that the Trump transition team plans to remove non-regulatory data from the EPA's website, like President Obama's 2013 Climate Action Plan, proving the risk was real-and making the hacking even more urgent.
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Wired reported on a group of roughly 60 hackers, scientists, and librarians working out of the University of Pennsylvania:
The group was split in two. One half was setting web crawlers upon NOAA web pages that could be easily copied and sent to the Internet Archive. The other was working their way through the harder-to-crack data sets-the ones that fuel pages like the EPA's incredibly detailed interactive map of greenhouse gas emissions, zoomable down to each high-emitting factory and power plant.
The rescued data about climate change will live on DataRefuge.org and the Internet Archive, where it should be easily searchable by any interested party.
Even without the Inside the EPA report, the hackers are not without reason. Following Trump's swearing in, the Internet reacted to the wiping of WhiteHouse.gov pages referring to vital issues such as the Affordable Care Act, LGBT rights, civil rights, and climate change. Other rebellions have occurred inside the .gov sphere as well, including the National Park Service's tweets about Trump's Inauguration crowd size, a new link on the Labor Department Women's Bureau website urging users to download its archive, and this tweet from the Defense Department, linking to an article about social media written the day before the Inauguration-take it as you will.
Social media postings sometimes provide an important window into a person’s #mentalhealth. Know what to look for. https://t.co/B0tPAHwjVK pic.twitter.com/AbXrw2QhQd
- U.S. Dept of Defense (@DeptofDefense) January 23, 2017
It seems the U.S. is entering a phase where government data won't be available to the public, the oxymoronic phrase "alternative facts" has worked its way into the political lexicon, and Scott Pruitt, a man who has sued the EPA multiple times over its air pollution regulations, is going to head the EPA. Good thing data, if it's rescued, lasts longer than rhetoric.
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