# Internet Archive The **Internet Archive** (founded 1996 by Brewster Kahle) is the San Francisco nonprofit digital library whose *Wayback Machine* — nearly a trillion archived web pages — functions as civil society's principal defense against [[The Memory Hole]]: the independent record that makes deletion visible, scrubbed pages citable, and regime-side revision of the online past detectably costly. Its *End of Term Web Archive* crawls capture federal websites at administration transitions, the baseline against which record-deletion operations are documented. In the vault as the preservation-infrastructure counterpart to the KB's own receipts-first method — and as an institution under recurring legal and cyberattack pressure (publisher litigation, 2024 breach/DDoS) that the documentation ecosystem depends on.