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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 15 2017, @04:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-magic dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:24PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 15 2017, @10:24PM (#467626)

    You know what would be fun? A book plot. We're all smart here. Lets figure it out.

    There's no reason for the government to hide climate data. We all know that 99% of devout democrat life long Cathedral members signal its important and 99% of right and alt right and alt lite people have a mixture of don't care / luv to troll / we're making the best bad choice / none of this matters absolutely or relative to something more important.

    So the above paragraph I think makes the point that a gig here, a gig there, aint none of it gonna change anyones minds on neither side. The stated coverup just doesn't matter.

    I enjoy two things. Shitty automobile analogies and shitty hard sci fi plots. This isn't a car analogy. And I'm having trouble coming up with a good hard sci fi plot involving hiding climate related data.

    Space aliens from the original Andromeda Strain book have landed on a meteor in the ocean and they're changing the water itself into ... Atlantis. Or Gray goo.

    The Fukushima reactors are having the following effect on the ocean.

    Some naughtiness is happening in the gulf of mexico due to the BP disaster but somehow the ships can't notice the problem up close. maybe the oily sheen looks weird up close but it looks really weird from space.

    Um... The RUSSIAN ARE CONTROLLING THE WEATHER that was a thing in the 50s 60s pulp sci fi, using radio waves or something, but maybe they're doing it for real with nanoparticles and until we can counter we're keeping it quiet... or maybe we're the ones controlling the weather and we are making the perfect weather to invade Iran or someplace. Is anywhere on the planet experiencing either really good or really bad weather? I mean maybe terrorists are causing the rain thats going to collapse that dam in California and its obvious when a trained meteorologist traces it all back to the weather coming out of Saudi Arabia or the Israeli embassy in California or who knows.

    No one wants to mention it but the death of bees is killing the grasses of Russia leading to topsoil erosion and the general public knew they would ... not give a F. so its probably not that. And the dead grass impacts methane release impacts temps making crazy weather and its just starting to take off. Hmm maybe.

    The sun is going nova next year so least total human suffering is to keep it quiet as long as possible, although fluctuations in solar output are starting already leading to weird weather... Naw too many astronomers and astrophysicists would notice, right? Right?

    Here is a semi-serious one. The sun has solar activity cycles. As any ham radio operator can explain, this has been the weirdest crappiest one in literally centuries. Something natural and big is going on with the sun geomagnetically and the earth is going to magnetic pole flip or some damn thing in response and the best response so far is to keep a lid on it.

    I mean, come on. Help a fellow SN'er out here. If the data is being hidden, AND if we're trapped in a realistic hard sci fi novel, the true coverup in the book plot is ...

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  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday February 17 2017, @02:02PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday February 17 2017, @02:02PM (#468202) Homepage Journal

    Closest thing I know of even vaguely in the sci-fi direction from this is:

    Library Wars (an anime series in which military force is being used to defend libraries from government.)

    And, of course, there's the ancient by now 1984.