Saving our Data

BRT posted a blurb titled Endangered Data showing how the Trump Administration is systematically putting the public's information into a memory hole in order to create complete operational opacity of the government, something rather disquieting to say the least but there is hope as people are fighting back, not only in preserving EPA content but also with NASA's invaluable earth science data, research paid for by us, not the repugs and not by the cabinet trolls this awful administration has foisted on us when Trump took over as president.

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.

Saving our data is key because, as per 1984 ...

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.