Authored by José Niño via Headline USA,

The FBI has issued a subpoena to Canadian domain registrar Tucows seeking to unmask the anonymous owner of Archive.today, a popular web archiving service used by millions worldwide. 

The subpoena, dated last Tuesday and posted publicly on Archive.today’s X account, states it relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI, as The Verge reported. However, the document provides no specific details about what alleged crime is under investigation.

The FBI is requesting comprehensive identifying information from Tucows, including customer or subscriber name, address of service, and billing address associated with Archive.today, per The Verge report.

Beyond basic contact details, the subpoena demands an extensive array of data such as telephone connection records, including incoming and outgoing calls and SMS or MMS records, payment information like credit card or bank account numbers, internet connectivity session times and durations, device identifiers, IP addresses, and details about services used such as email, cloud computing, and gaming services.

The subpoena instructs Tucows not to disclose its existence indefinitely, as any such disclosure could interfere with an ongoing investigation and enforcement of the law, as recounted by Gizmodo. 

That request became moot when Archive.today publicly posted the document. Journalist Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, drew attention to the subpoena on X, emphasizing that Archive.today is used by journalists and researchers to “document edits to articles, bypass subscription walls and avoid giving traffic to the failing corporate media.”

Launched in 2012, Archive.today functions similarly to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine but with key differences.

Users can submit URLs to create permanent snapshots of web pages, preserving content before it disappears or changes. 

The service supports ZIP downloads and image based page saves, and crucially, pages are almost never deleted except in extreme cases like child pornography. As AV Club noted, the site gained prominence during the 2014 GamerGate controversy, when users employed it to track article edits while avoiding directing traffic to certain websites.

Very little is known about who runs Archive.today. The original domain was registered in May 2012 by someone using the name Denis Petrov from Prague, Czech Republic, as Gigazine reported. However, this is likely a pseudonym, since Denis Petrov is an extremely common Russian name, and the same contact information was used to register sketchy domains including carding forums and piracy sites.