(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Services such as SlettMeg.no and others work diligently to remove information that individuals experience it is uncomfortable to have lying published on websites they have no control over. There is a lot of abuse of private pictures and texts, and it is easy to understand why some information should be removed. But there are other forces working to preserve absolutely everything that exists on the internet.
We can divide them into three: government, commercial information collectors and non-commercial information collectors. Some authorities carry out regular monitoring on the Internet, as we know from the discussions on the EU's data storage directive and the debate on the Snowden papers. Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia and China are very active. But also Sweden, and to some extent Norway and some other countries. Norway has shown a much greater interest in content monitoring on the Swedish side of the border, where the so-called FRA legislation allows Swedish intelligence to preserve both metadata and content in all electronic communications that cross Swedish soil. A lot of Norwegian traffic goes that way.
Then we have commercial players, such as Google, Facebook and other analytics companies, who vacuum the internet and take care of the information to sell it further. In another column, we can delve a little more into the opportunities to find information about yourself and others at Facebook. Today, I am going to highlight a representative of the last group, namely the non-commercial that runs data collection that is made available to most people. Effective, fun and a little scary, this too.
The Internet Archive is one such non-commercial operator. The site offers a tool called "The WayBackMachine", which advertises with "Search the internet as it was". Here you can, for example, enter www.aftenposten.no and get a calendar. Click on the desired date and you will come to a version of what the Aftenposten online newspaper looked like that day. For such use the service is uncontroversial. Filing an online newspaper cover should be as important as a paper newspaper cover. For many years, online newspapers were sloppy with archival documentation.
The Internet Archive system is far from perfect, but a great deal of information is kept here. You will be able to find the websites of closed companies, press releases that politicians or companies would like to forget, and much more. I have used it a lot myself to look up old information from the site www.odin.dep.no, which the government apparatus used in the years before www.regjeringen.no was established. There you can see all the press releases from Devold's time as defense minister.
The example www.sig-protection.com also came in handy. It was the website of a Norwegian private security company that offered highly controversial services in Africa. The site was closed down almost immediately when it became known that two of their employees – Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland – had been arrested in Congo. With WayBackMachine, however, you can go back to the weeks before the arrest, and recreate the website as it looked then.
There are several other ways to retrieve deleted information. I'll mention one more here. If you do a Google search, you will often see the option to choose one buffered version of the page you get recommended. This is since it looked the last time Google's robot came by, and it's often different than the main link you get recommended.
Tarjei Leer-Salvesen is an investigative freelance journalist with a background from Ny Tid as well as Klassekampen, Fædrelandsvennen, Dagbladet and NRK Brennpunkt.
He is also behind the web portal Insyn.no.
