The closure is another casualty in the ongoing challenge of funding quality public health journalism. Harvard Public Health had covered topics ranging from the Flint water crisis to processed foods, mental health, and structural racism – work that won recognition and built an audience of nearly 15,000 newsletter subscribers, 90 percent of whom had no connection to Harvard.

Fitzgerald encouraged readers to download articles they found useful before the site eventually goes dark. But individual downloads are an imperfect solution for preserving a decade’s worth of public health journalism. The question became: how do we ensure this body of work remains accessible to researchers, public health professionals, and the public long after Harvard stops paying the hosting bills?

The Distributed Press Clone API

Distributed Press is an open-source publishing tool developed by Hypha Worker Co-operative and Sutty Coop that automates publishing and hosting content to both the traditional web and decentralized protocols like IPFS and Hypercore. Where traditional web hosting depends on a single provider, distributed networks allow anyone to help co-host content – making it resilient against the kind of institutional decisions that led to Harvard Public Health’s closure.

The recently launched Clone API makes this preservation process remarkably straightforward. Rather than manually downloading and re-uploading thousands of pages, the API can crawl an entire website and publish it directly to IPFS and Hypercore.

The entire preservation took three API calls and about an hour of automated crawling.

Technical Walkthrough

Here are the steps to preserve a website using the Distributed Press Clone API:

Step 1: Obtain API Access

Distributed Press requires an authorization token. Instructions for requesting access are available at distributed.press/2024/10/18/get-a-token/. Once obtained, the token is entered into the Distributed Press API Swagger interface.

Step 2: Create a Site Configuration

Using the API, create a new site with the target domain (harvardpublichealth.org) in the configuration bundle. This tells Distributed Press which domain to crawl and how to structure the resulting archive.

Step 3: Initiate the Clone

Call the Clone API endpoint to begin crawling. The system works in the background, following links and downloading assets. For a site the size of Harvard Public Health, this takes approximately one hour.

Step 4: Query Site Information

Once complete, query the site information to retrieve the archive’s addresses on both protocols. The API returns a JSON response containing the IPFS CID (Content Identifier), Hypercore key, and various gateway URLs.

Accessing the Archive

The preserved Harvard Public Health site is now available at two permanent addresses:

IPFS:
bafybeihg5mdtwrfa4ywm4orsloojvysuaurr36p57tlwshydv2rgbxws5a

Accessible via gateway:
https://bafybeihg5mdtwrfa4ywm4orsloojvysuaurr36p57tlwshydv2rgbxws5a.ipfs.ipfs.hypha.coop/

The IPFS CID is a cryptographic hash of the content itself. As long as anyone on the IPFS network continues to pin this CID, the content remains accessible – regardless of what happens to Harvard’s servers. The same principle applies to the Hypercore key. These addresses are permanent: they will always point to this exact version of the site.

Why This Matters

Web content is fragile. Studies have found that the average lifespan of a webpage is measured in years, not decades. Institutional priorities shift, budgets get cut, and valuable archives disappear without warning. The Harvard Public Health closure is a textbook case: the institution decided journalism wasn’t core to its mission, and a decade of public health reporting became an orphan.

Traditional archiving solutions like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine provide important preservation, but they operate as centralized services with their own resource constraints and priorities. Distributed protocols offer a complementary approach where preservation becomes a collective responsibility. Anyone who values this content can pin it to their own IPFS node, helping ensure it remains available.

For researchers and public health professionals, this archive preserves not just individual articles but the navigational structure of the original site – the way topics were organized, the relationships between pieces, and the editorial voice that connected them. That contextual integrity is often lost when content is scattered across individual downloads or incomplete archive snapshots.

Replicating This Process

Organizations with valuable web archives, whether facing shutdown or simply wanting redundant preservation, can use this same approach. The process requires:

1. An account with Distributed Press (contact the team for access)
2. A domain configuration for the target site
3. Sufficient time for the crawl to complete

The resulting archives can be pinned by anyone with an IPFS node or Hypercore peer, distributing the preservation responsibility across multiple parties and jurisdictions.

For those interested in the technical implementation, the Distributed Press documentation is available at docs.distributed.press, and the Clone API is documented in the API reference.

Next Steps

This preservation effort was initiated independently by Hypha, but demonstrates a workflow that could be systematically applied to at-risk publications. As journalism continues to face financial pressures, having fast, reliable tools for distributed archiving becomes increasingly important.

We encourage institutions facing similar closures to consider distributed preservation as part of their wind-down planning. We also encourage researchers and archivists to pin this CID and contribute to the network of peers keeping Harvard Public Health’s journalism accessible.

If you have questions about applying these techniques to your own preservation needs, reach out to the Distributed Press team via their documentation site, or contact Starling Lab at info@starlinglab.org.

This project was documented by Hypha Worker Co-operative. The preservation was completed using the Distributed Press Clone API on March 4, 2025.

Today, we are proud to announce the publication of “Sanctions, Scams, and Deepfakes,” a major investigation by our partners at Airwars into the illicit flow of luxury cars from Europe to Russia. Starling Lab worked in support of the investigative team to preserve the digital evidence supporting their findings, while the reporters traced the physical movement of vehicles across borders.

At least, that’s what they originally set out to do.

At the center of this investigation into the apparent smuggling operation of cars into Russia laid a red herring. The investigative team initially believed they were tracking real sanctions-evasion schemes bringing luxury cars from Germany to Russia, but instead discovered the operation was largely a scam targeting Russians themselves. The deepfaked video of a legitimate Russian car dealer explaining the smuggling process, the paid actors posing as satisfied customers, and the geolocated cars in Germany were all elaborate deceptions designed to make the fraud appear credible – with potential victims losing thousands of euros to scammers likely operating from Ukraine rather than to actual smugglers delivering sanctioned vehicles.

The investigation was supported by IJ4EU, a grant scheme for cross-border investigative journalism in Europe. The Starling Lab did not participate in the grant application, nor did it receive any funds. Our support of the investigation was purely pro bono and limited to that project.

Technical Stack Deployed

During the investigative phase, the research and investigative team needed to browse hundreds of online sources, from Belarusian border cam footage to social media and social messages.

The core technical challenge was clear: How do we allow investigators to move fast while maintaining a forensic chain of custody? A simple screenshot is insufficient for legal or historical proof. We needed a system where an investigator could claim, “at this time and date, I browsed this unique URL which contained precisely this content,” and be able to back it up with cryptographic proof.

Fortunately, we have been working with state-of-the-art web archiving tools for years – and have even produced a whitepaper on best practices for web archiving. The approach described in this project aims to ensure the collected material meets the high bar for authenticity and probative value required in legal proceedings. It directly addresses the belief that these tools and techniques can be cumbersome or slow down the investigative process. 

This perception being a key barrier to adoption, we set out to build a bridge between consumer-friendly tools and forensic-grade archiving. We recommended the team use Raindrop.io, a lightweight browser extension, to bookmark relevant links and add annotations. This allowed the investigators to simply “click and save” without leaving their browser.

Behind the scenes, however, a preservation pipeline was built: on schedule, Github Actions would trigger Typescript scripts tasked with fetching new bookmarks that might have been added to Raindrop; and where appropriate, to schedule their individual crawling in the Starling Lab Browsertrix Cloud account.

In total, we preserved more than 9,000 unique URLs, totalling 98 GiB in compressed form.

A major early lead was the case of the border crossing between Lithuania and Belarus, which the team understood as a key milestone in the supply of cars into Russia. The border crossing is monitored by webcams that refresh every 10 minutes or so. By running our crawls on schedule, we were able to provide the team once a day with a collage of captures – in the hope of substantiating that one of the known delivery lorries was doing the journey, as the Telegram channel seemed to claim e.g. below:

Despite monitoring the webcams for a month and a half, reviewing about 3,800 photographs (two shots every 10 minutes most hours of the daytime), we were not able to find one of the known trucks. 

We, however, witnessed the spectacle of political opposition Mikalai Statkevich sitting in this no-man’s land after having been freed from Belarus, reportedly refusing to walk to Lithuania and go into exile.

Learnings

Proactive engagement

The earlier and the more closely we are involved, the better our chances to do good work. This oft-repeated canon of collaboration is worth its salt for a reason.

In the context of this investigation, we think we were able to support the collection of web content to a fair extent. Frequent touchpoints with a team helped identify developing parts of their workflow – for example the need to monitor the webcam photographs, which were being overwritten relatively frequently.

Time and opportunity to engage

As the story pivoted from tracking the supply chain to the realisation that key elements had been fabricated and were deepfakes or shallowfakes, the pressure to make a looming deadline led to a tightening of the loop on the investigative team’s side. The result of that was material received by investigators in the last days, prior to publication, was not shared with us for authentication and preservation.

Furthermore, we had prepared for a planned field trip to dealerships in Lithuania, and ran a short training for reporters on using the Proofmode app to take photographs, cryptographically seal them, and share them on – this trip however never materialized as the story pivoted away.

Seeing as the investigation relates to both forgeries and inauthentic material, we regard these omissions as missed opportunities.

The need for redactions

The pre-publication legal review sought by Airwars led to a cautious treatment of the evidence collected. The story was complex, with a good deal of uncertainty about what was real, and which of the persons and organisations involved were in full possession of the facts.

While technically well within reach, we opted to not publish full embeds of the Telegram posts and messages, as well as to redact some metadata from them. We are also not making the archive publicly accessible. These measures aim to protect car sellers, dealerships, clients, and anyone else whose photographs might have been used against their will and in support of the scam.

This case study further underscores the need for verifiable redaction technology to be part of the feature set of web archiving tools for journalists. In service of this requirement, we have deployed techniques from the field of Zero-Knowledge Proofs in our Rolling Stone investigation into war crimes in Bosnia. This technology allows publishers to redact sensitive information (such as names in documents or metadata in digital files) while generating a mathematical proof that certifies only specific pixels or data fields were obscured. 

Scaleable

This pilot project allowed us to test and refine a preservation mechanism that is both robust and non-intrusive to the investigative workflow. We are eager to further deploy the processes developed during this collaboration, and this model more broadly, for future investigations and other partnerships with journalistic organizations.

UPDATE: Since this was published, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on protecting human rights defenders in the digital age. It addresses several important issues that our Lab has been focused on. Scroll to the end of this page for more details.

The report notes how Starling Lab supported efforts in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands with tools that work even in low-connectivity environments, which is needed where the “digital divide hits many human rights defenders very hard.”

In a speech this month presenting her findings, Lawlor observed how some of those most at-risk include “journalists covering human rights issues at the local level.” Starling’s methodology was used by journalists to document environmental destruction – and confront climate change denialism. Our submission to Lawlor’s office focused on data authentication, decentralized storage, and cryptographic verification. Together, these ensure documentation remains tamper-evident and accessible, even when governments seek to dismiss the truth.

Her report includes several valuable recommendations to governments and other international actors, two of which resonate with our work:

• “Expand access to the Internet and secure communication tools, including by increasing funding for such digital security resources as encrypted communication applications and secure reporting channels.”
• “Support efforts to enable human rights defenders to store and safeguard their information securely, without fear of unlawful surveillance or data breaches, including putting in place robust legal safeguards to prevent the misuse of digital tools to suppress dissent or target defenders and ensure that their digital rights are protected.”

We appreciate being included among so many other human rights defenders, and remain grateful to Pablo Albarenga for his photojournalism in Brazil, as well as to Inside Climate News for publishing this important coverage.

And we hope this underscores the vital role of trusted digital evidence in defending human rights and environmental justice.

🔗 Read the Special Rapporteur’s remarks;
📄 Read the full UN report;
📕 Don’t miss our own case study;
📰 And the Inside Climate News article

Starling Lab was previously referenced in a report to the UNHRC in 2023 by the Rapporteur on the right to education, who acknowledged similar methods used by the lab as emerging “good practices” for documenting war crimes against civilian objects like schools.

Update (April 16, 2025): Our submission is also echoed in a new resolution from the UN Human Rights Council, which addresses the protection of human rights defenders in the digital age (full text: A/HRC/58/L.27/Rev.1).

The resolution emphasizes “universal connectivity” and “meaningful connectivity” as essential for defenders’ work, calls for “technical solutions for strong encryption and anonymity,” and advocates for secure information storage “without fear of unlawful surveillance.” It specifically recognizes the “growing number of digital attacks” on defenders and acknowledges the “protection gap” caused by lack of accountability.

These address key points from our submission on data integrity and authentication technologies for remote areas.

We’re particularly encouraged by the HRC’s recognition that “new and emerging digital technologies can hold great potential for strengthening democratic institutions and the resilience of civil society, empowering civic engagement and enabling the work of human rights defenders, public participation and the open and free exchange of ideas, and for the exercise of all human rights.” This aligns perfectly with our mission at Starling Lab to harness technology to establish trust in digital records.

Our earlier submission outlined innovative approaches to produce documentary evidence and combat digital denialism. This includes cryptographic methods that authenticate evidence from the point of capture, enabling defenders in remote areas to establish credibility despite connectivity challenges. The submission also referenced ongoing work on telecommunication technologies, including 5G, to further enhance these capabilities.