Now You See It

Pity the modern historian. Recorded civilization in the form of cave paintings, stone tablets, and hieroglyphics has endured for millennia, but Web pages on the Internet — the tabula rasa of contemporary society — may emerge and vanish within a matter of hours. But the dreaded "Error 404/File Not Found" message on your browser no longer dooms a Web page to oblivion, thanks to the efforts of Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive. Kahle has been archiving Web pages since 1996, and he now boasts an online collection of more than 10 billion Web pages.

Browsers can access this archive for free through a search engine called the Wayback Machine (www.archive.org). They can visit the Times of India Web site as it appeared in the summer of 1998 and read news accounts covering the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. Or browsers can go back to November 1999 and look at the Web sites of anti–World Trade Organization groups such as the Ruckus Society and Global Exchange to see how they rallied their troops in the weeks prior to the "Battle in Seattle."

The Internet Archive also gathers sites on a daily basis for special collections. In case anyone wonders how Al Gore might have handled the war on terrorism, all of his foreign policy speeches can be read with the help of the Election Collection 2000 archive (web.archive.org/collections/e2k.html). And future historians will appreciate the September 11 archive (september11.archive.org), which includes U.S. military sites and global news coverage courtesy of Le Monde and the BBC.

However, not all post–September 11 Web sites are welcome additions to the Internet Archive. The U.S. government has recently engaged in a flurry of self-censorship, purging material from its public Web sites — such as maps of national pipelines and reports on water resources — that might prove useful to terrorists. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which removed information from its sites concerning the United States’ 103 operating nuclear reactors, asked the Internet Archive to cease offering access to those Web pages. But other government agencies have not been as "backward-thinking." An interactive map of nuclear reactors, located on the International Nuclear Safety Center’s Web site, has been temporarily removed "pending the outcome of a policy review by the U.S. Department of Energy and Argonne National Laboratory." Those maps remain accessible through the Wayback Machine.