Minute, technical, cosmetic errors plague efforts of open source monitors who scour the Web and archive its content. In the context of legal investigations, these minor defects are considerable challenges to the reliability of the artifacts, and thus to the facts they aim to prove. Moreover, small organizations and individual investigators face a greater burden in arguing the probative weight of the material they collect than large, reputable, and established institutions.

We are developing the Witness Server prototype To replicate social trust in digital capture by involving reputable institutions as simultaneous observers of the web.

In short: a Witness Server is a service hosted by an institution that conducts on-demand web crawls. When a researcher initiates a local capture, a request is simultaneously dispatched to several partner Witness Servers (such as Harvard LIL or the Atlantic Council). Each institution performs its own crawl independently using its own infrastructure, creating a multi-perspective record of the same web content at that exact moment.

The prototypes follow all our learnings about web archives, Including the use of the WACZ open source format which bundles signed and hashed files.

By comparing multiple institutional archives, investigators can explain away non-material “cosmetic” defects (like pop-up banners) and provide overwhelming proof of the core content’s authenticity.