Data Rescue Movement: Geeks vs Trump

The Trump administration has started to alter the governmental websites related to climate change. Climate change references have been deleted from WhiteHouse.gov, and some data has been erased from the Environmental Protection Agency’s website and the State Department’s website. With President Donald Trump being a climate change denier and critic of the Paris Agreement, this comes as no surprise.

This Quartz article describes the phenomenon of guerrilla archiving or "data rescues," held by grassroots activists. Since before the inauguration, devoted scientists, researchers, programmers and technologists have been trying to archive as many climate and environmental data sets as possible. All-day data rescues have been held in Toronto, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Boston, Michigan and New York, and more are yet to come.

"Structured like all-day hackathons and organised by volunteers, the events focus on downloading federal science — especially climate-change related — data sets from government websites and uploading them to a new website, datarefuge.org, which they hope can act as an alternative website for federal data during the current administration," writes Thomas Kvistholt in the article.

The aim is it to safeguard federal data for scientists and local administration to use in the future.

“If you don’t have the data, you’ll be told your problem doesn’t exist. It is in a way a struggle over what we consider reality," Jerome Whittington, the NYU professor who organised one of the events, says in the article.

The article is an example of a different way to hold government accountable, showing that a bunch of geeks are just as important as protesters on the streets. The aim of the data rescues, and their new custom-made app, is to enable anyone with 10 minutes to spare to “attack a quick data set." This way, anyone can become part of the opposition without even leaving the couch.