A week before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, more than 250 volunteers assembled at the University of Pennsylvania for a two-day data-backup operation. After some training, the volunteers went to work downloading data from US government websites—mainly belonging to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—and saving the information on independent servers. The effort was a mix of straightforward copying and writing software to access sites. In total, the volunteers duplicated about 1.5 terabytes—including statistics on renewable energy, toxic chemical releases, and oil spills—from more than 7000 websites.
The event was hosted by DataRefuge, one of several data-backup groups around the country. The groups are focusing mainly on data related to climate—much of which is in the US, although other places, notably Europe and Japan, also have Earth-observing programs. The groups point to the threats implied by the rhetoric of the Trump campaign and administration, which have used “hoax” and...
