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Wired reports that data sets from NASA - mainly those related to climate - that used to be publicly available have started to disappear and that a group of "diehard coders" at UC Berkeley and other places worked over the weekend to "tag and bag" this data with the Internet archive:
[...] 200 adults had willingly sardined themselves into a fluorescent-lit room in the bowels of Doe Library to rescue federal climate data.
Like similar groups across the country—in more than 20 cities—they believe that the Trump administration might want to disappear this data down a memory hole. So these hackers, scientists, and students are collecting it to save outside government servers.
But now they're going even further. Groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which organized the Berkeley hackathon to collect data from NASA's earth sciences programs and the Department of Energy, are doing more than archiving. Diehard coders are building robust systems to monitor ongoing changes to government websites. And they're keeping track of what's already been removed—because yes, the pruning has already begun.
[...] Starting in August, access to Goddard Earth Science Data required a login. But with a bit of totally legal digging around the site (DataRefuge prohibits outright hacking), Tek found a buried link to the old FTP server. He clicked and started downloading. By the end of the day he had data for all of 2016 and some of 2015. It would take at least another 24 hours to finish.
The non-coders hit dead-ends too. Throughout the morning they racked up "404 Page not found" errors across NASA's Earth Observing System website. And they more than once ran across databases that had already been emptied out, like the Global Change Data Center's reports archive and one of NASA's atmospheric CO2 datasets.
And this is where the real problem lies. They can't be sure when this data disappeared (or if anyone backed it up first).
[Ed. - emphasis added by submitter]
[Continued...]
This is on the heels of a December 2016 article in The Washington Post, titled "Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump", that details several additional initiatives along the same lines.
Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.
The efforts include a "guerrilla archiving" event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.
"Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you'd want to hedge against," said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. "Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we're planning for that."
[...] At the University of Toronto this weekend, researchers are holding what they call a "guerrilla archiving" event to catalogue key federal environmental data ahead of Trump's inauguration. The event "is focused on preserving information and data from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has programs and data at high risk of being removed from online public access or even deleted," the organizers said. "This includes climate change, water, air, toxics programs."
So Soylentils, are there any US .gov public databases that you don't want to see disappear?
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday February 15 2017, @04:21PM
A good friend of mine does work with those types of data sets. Granted, he does more stuff with astronomy than he does with terrestrial climate data, but he does work with that too. He works directly with NASA for a lot of stuff on (I believe) a university grant. I think he's technically a state employee as such, not a government one, though I'm unsure of those technicalities.
He and I were talking about this the other day when another friend sent us bits and pieces similar to the article here. He's skeptical of all of it given that he got a self-imposed gag order (almost immediately after Trump started reacting poorly to the NPS being funny) saying basically "be sure to be careful what you talk about in any perceived official capacity".
At any rate, he's skeptical about any data actually destroyed or going to be destroyed, because he thinks that if it were, that would be something they would be immediately reacting to, as it's the point of his team's project. So removed from the public view? Yeah, I can see that. Actually Memory Holed? I dunno about that. Is that still a bad guy thing to do? Sure.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 15 2017, @05:04PM
saying basically "be sure to be careful what you talk about in any perceived official capacity".
That's another fascinating aspect of the Anti-Trump reaction as that has been BAU at private companies since... the dawn of private companies I think. Even before social media most corporate employee handbooks have something about "direct all media inquiries of any form to the P.R. department"
I believe that's part of the whole Trump-ian 5 dimensional chess meme in that shrieking about censorship is probably very motivational for the people who are already dyed in the wool democrats, but to the 90 million or so employees in the nation of varying ratios of D/R voting, they look really bad, which is good for Trump.
Likewise shrieking analogies between removal of data and Hitler burning books by Jewish authors I've seen on TV fake news, is, again, really motivating for people who already hate Trump and would never vote for anyone to the right of Lenin, but that looks awful to the more balanced majority of the population, again good for Trump.
The thing I don't understand about the left wing desire to cry wolf, is the don't understand its not working so they double down, combined with crying wolf means after maybe a hundred more fake news like this, people are going to ignore if he actually does build camps or start giving one way helicopter rides. I mean, OK, you're cheering up your base, which would be good if that didn't result in looking even worse in riots. Or OK its blowing off left wing steam as part of the grieving process as progressivism is tossed into the dustbin of history where it belongs, OK, next step is just race riots and fomenting communist revolution or ?
I mean, one side clearly has a plan and goals and a worldview model that fits reality better than the predecessor model, and the only response so far is "our lower classes will riot until put down by force and our higher classes will make stuff up until uniformly ignored by everyone" and they think that will actually work? Or is that just how movements die, kind of leaderless flailing around in failure, the last dying gasps of liberalism and progressivism is fake news about climate censorship? Maybe its all they got left.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:19PM
That last part was something that I just had a conversation with the girlfriend about. The left is auguring themselves into the ground with all of the protests, and I honestly don't understand what their end game is. It's a little tinfoil-hatty, but it almost seems like their goal is to turn the government into something resembling Nazis by violently protesting everything until that starts getting cracked down on, and then squealing about how right they were as if it was something that was going to happen all along.
I don't think that's going to work out for them the way they want it to though. I mean, I'm unhappy about Trump. I'd have been unhappy about Clinton, and probably about as much. I'm not going to burn down my town over it though, because that doesn't engender goodwill toward the cause. That only makes people who were on the fence be able to see you more easily as the enemy. And I think that's what's changed in the last 60 years or so. There's so much information that unless you're really looking at something, and you go back to study it, you don't really know what's going on.
To elaborate: Even with any perceived liberal slant, and even watching the mainstream news, the 5 minute sound byte only gives you enough to see that protesters at $city were attacking people, wearing masks, and have probably smashed in windows and set stuff on fire. Don't watch the news and live there? You see all the smashed windows and cars and might ask someone what happened. You can't really put that damage into a context that makes them seem like the good guys to Joe Average who just wants to get to work and is staring at mayhem and scratching his head. Assholes block your bus to work? Yeah, getting into work late because of strangely dressed "not like you's" is really going to get people thinking and voting your way.
I mean, people lose their shit over their crappacino not making it out to them in (what their idea is of) time, or god forbid, with real cream in it instead of soy. I think it's something to be said about how already tense and living by a thread of tolerance for putting up with anything outside of the norm the modern American is. Not all are that way, and I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I think that's why stuff like these protests are going to fall flat. The "average American", if I might permit myself the hubris required to presume upon their behalf, just wants to be left alone to focus on not going on a murder spree set off by all the other borderline unbearable bullshit that they have to stare in the face. If they weren't already with you marching in the streets, you're not going to get them to do anything but revile you and maybe even remember it next time there's an election. Well done!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 15 2017, @09:52PM
attacking people, wearing masks, and have probably smashed in windows and set stuff on fire
Its like gang violence. A Hollywood treatment could find a Shakespearean drama of competition and intrigue in the rise and fall of various gangs. The deal making the back stabbing the suspense the drama edge of your theater seat. Perhaps in half a century it would be like fawning mafia movies where people loved the Godfather movies. They think they'll get he academy award for their part in this drama if only someone would put it up on the movie screen. If only we could make people care.
Meanwhile in reality, same situation just normal people watching TV report of the same story, see 15 seconds of the outline of a dead body on the TV and a pool of blood and some pistol cartridges and think everyone involved is a bunch of dirtbags they want nothing to do with and actively avoid and would cross the street if they saw one coming down the road. but but but the Shakespeare ... sorry nobody cares.
Maybe its some weird desire, they wanna go out as martyrs. America hate our beliefs, well, TV will be our Colosseum, the police or natguard will be the lions tearing us limb from limb. Are you not entertained? Yeah I guess I am a little.
Example two. One word, same problem as above. Che.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday February 15 2017, @08:58PM
Also, to your first point, yeah, no shit. I'm reluctant to state online where I even work, lest someone try to use that as some way to get me fired for something I said elsewhere, in another context. I recall the dongle joke fiasco.
My response to him telling me about the email was, "well, that's how things have always been for me. Does that really seem unusual?" He didn't really have much of a response. Not that he had much to worry about as he's not exactly outspoken or particularly liberal, but I think the thing that freaked him out about it wasn't that it happened as much as that it came down literally inauguration day.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday February 16 2017, @07:24AM
Remember, these are the same people who think reporting on false rape accusations as if they were true is good because it "starts a conversation" about the rape epidemic so rampant they only have false rape accusations as examples.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 15 2017, @07:31PM
I think he's technically a state employee as such, not a government one, though I'm unsure of those technicalities.
I worked in state government for 27 years, and sometimes, like in your suggestion, the lines are blurred. My case was similar to the university guy, in that we had to report to the feds (scanning boxes and boxes of paper and Fed-Exing CDs, since the internet is insecure). At one point I was working on the state's part in getting our computers to talk to other states' computers (this was in the early 1990s, I'm retired now).
But the state comptroller cut all the checks they paid me with. The state is paying your university friend, but part of that money comes originally from the feds.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org