The appeal to Angela Rasmussen comes out of the blue, raising an unsettling question. Has she heard rumors that key datasets will be removed from the U.S. Disease Control and Prevention website the next day?
This is something Rasmussen thinks will never happen.
“It's never really thought that the CDC would actually start deleting some of these critical public health data sets,” said a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. “These data are very important to everyone's health, not only in the United States, but also All over the world.”
The next day, January 31, Rasmussen began to see the data disappear. She knew she needed to act.
Rasmussen contacted a friend of a bioinformatician who knew how to save data and make a backup copy of the website. Together with others, they scramble to keep the data in case it is deleted.
On the eve of data clearance, many people stayed up late to save the CDC website. @charles_gaba Downloaded the entire content.
One of us is working to make this saved data accessible and publicly available resources. There is more, but start here https://t.co/cljgv1u9lp
“We set out to archive the entire CDC website,” Rasmussen said.
Since then, Rasmussen and her colleagues have worked with others like Charles Gaba, a U.S. healthcare data analyst, and have turned their attention to other websites, with the help of health data, keeping Information from departments and agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services is used.
Rasmussen said the publication of certain studies, such as three studies, which revealed that H5N1 bird flu also appeared to be affected by changes in drug administration.
Rasmussen is just one of Canadian residents who join an archive effort that has become international guerrilla to save copies of U.S. government web pages, and U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is quickly offline data .
A New York Times analysis found that thousands of pages in the days after Trump’s inauguration were part of the reason for Trump’s executive orders against diversity initiatives.
The pages seen by observers disappeared, and these people could monitor HIV infection, respond to youth health risks, and include census data, educational data and information on assisted replication technologies. A website that contains the names of people related to January 6, 2021, has also been deleted.
Comparisons before Trump's inauguration and on Wednesday's USDATA.GOV homepage showed 522 data sets.
Some commenters on social media cited the disappearing data that booked for burning in the 1930s.
When asked about changes to the CDC website, the agency said it was part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) change.
“All changes to the HHS and HHS department websites/manuscripts are in line with President Trump's January 20 executive order,” senior news official Rosa Norman said in an email response.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not answered questions from CBC News.
It is not clear whether the data still exists on government servers.
Those who archive data believe it is paid with our taxes and should be available to researchers and everyone else in the public domain.
The government believes that deletion is not necessarily final and information can be accessed through the Wayback machine archived on the Internet.
On Tuesday, a U.S. federal judge approved an interim order directing the CDC and the FDA to restore public information on their websites, and the court heard lawsuits questioning the Trump administration's decision to revoke the information.
Internet archives sometimes miss data
Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archives (IA), which crawls and archive copies of the website. His nonprofit is part of the Term Web Archives project, which has documented the U.S. government website at the end of each government since 2004 and launched the Democratic Library Project, which is government research and publishing from around the world collection of things.
However, Internet Archives' crawlers do not always pick up datasets and databases.
Those who work to protect U.S. government data sets are downloading them, and in many cases, storing them with the help of Internet Archives.
“The efforts of these collaborative entities are much more archived than other times,” Kahler said. “I think it shows that people are very enthusiastic about trying to ensure government records remain intact.”
Carl said that so far, the U.S. government has not followed government data stored in Internet archives.
“That would be very unusual. There has never been anything like this happening to us,” Kahler said.
However, if this happens, its U.S. data center will be powered by the Canadian Internet Archives in British Columbia and vice versa. Carr said the democratic library project is also located in Canada.
“That's what the library does. We're there to document what's going on – it's the role we play,” Kaller said. “Canada is always there to help the U.S. Internet Archives.”
At the University of Guelph, geography professor Eric Nost is working with the Environmental Data Governance Program (EDGI) to preserve EPA data, especially with climate change and the environment Justice-related data.
“The data are very important in being able to track environmental changes, for example, in the United States, where pollution, where there is a climate hazard, the biggest pollution burden,” NOST said. “This is obviously very important to Americans, but it also There is also a real correlation with Canadians.”
He said, for example, some Canadian cities have a good time with U.S. factories.
“It’s also important for us to have access to things in the chimney.”
NOST said he knows at least three people in Canada are also working to archive environmental data. He said his team has prioritized 60 datasets or tools, archived most of them as well as reconstruction tools like EPA's EJSCREEN.
NOST said his team also found that some sites are currently blocking anyone who accesses them from outside the United States, such as the Federal Emergency Administration's national risk index chart.
Matt Price, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, also worked with EDGI, said it is important to keep data because the United States is the world's largest scientific power.
“We should care about U.S. data, because the U.S. federal government has been the default custodian of the large amount of data needed around the world,” Price said.
Jessica Mahr is a Toronto-based employee for the Center for Environmental Policy Innovation, helping coordinate different groups’ attempts to archive U.S. government environmental data. She said the data and tools that were deleted would impact research, thus informing policies to improve quality of life.
“Without these tools, you won’t be able to do with whom you suffer and where to fund or plan to improve their lives,” Maher said.
