SAN FRANCISCO – The Internet Archive marked the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol as one might expect: launching an upload of publicly accessible materials from the trials of 1,575 defendants who took part in the attempted overthrow of America’s government to keep President Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.
There’s nearly three terabytes of material being uploaded, according to the anonymous source of the materials.
There’s so much material that it may take days for it all to go live. “In total, we’re talking about 15,000 files across all the collection, which includes PDFs, images, movies and recordings,” the uploader said in an email exchange late Tuesday. “I didn’t expect it to take so long to upload.”
The Internet Archive was chosen as a repository for its “pretty open policy for uploads” and its existing tranche of Jan. 6-related materials, “which means they don’t seem to be actively taking it down,” despite federal pressure on news media, the uploader wrote. “Plus they’ll take PDFs, images, movies in all the formats, and this stuff is in lots of formats.”
The massive 30-year library of online material—founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Brewster Kahle—began posting the videos, images, and court documents Tuesday, promising “thousands of uploads” of public exhibits from about 360 court cases. It also points users to an overlapping NPR project, which seems to refer to some of the same materials but summarizes them, rather than shares them.
The uploader called the NPR version “an excellent remix” and pointed out that credit for the materials coming to the Internet Archive belongs to others. The files came from “a friend of a lawyer,” the uploader said.
“Nice to be seen, but I’m not the real hero here—it’s the lawyers and media people who took the offering of evidence being released to the public and worked hard to actually make the courts follow through on that promise. The result is this collection,” the uploader added.
The archive started posting the same day as the Trump White House put up its own version of events, which argued that the insurrectionists were persecuted “for exercising their First Amendment rights.”
Among the first files appearing in the archive was a video posted by defendant Darrell Youngers as an exhibit in his sentencing. In it, he’s heard exclaiming, his face covered by a mask, “The Capitol building has literally been broken into! This is what a revolution motherfucking looks like.”
Not all the videos are selfies—security camera footage is included as well, including an early upload from the sentencing of defendant John Andries that shows Capitol police backing away from a group of advancing invaders waving American flags and a Gadsden banner (“Don’t Tread on Me”). One of the biggest expected files, according to the person at the email account, is an hourslong stretch of security camera footage from the Capitol lawn capturing the J6 riot from start to finish.
“I think the most important/informative files in this collection are those long-running video files, covering hours without a break, where you see Jan. 6 for what it was, without editing or highlighting,” the uploader said. “There seems to have been a lot of debate over the last five years about what this event was, a simple walk after a rally or a coup. The unbroken footage lets people decide … it just recorded what happened in real time.”
The growing archive of Jan. 6 insurrection materials is here.
This breaking story is special to BINJ.News, the independent weekly magazine published by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
