Data Hoarders Are Rushing to Save Vanishing US Health Records

Computer science professor Niema Moshiri was watching TV last Thursday evening when his phone lit up with frantic messages from a virologist in Canada. The warning was urgent: back up the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website — immediately.

From his home in San Diego, Moshiri worked past midnight, scraping and saving gigabytes of CDC data he was told could soon be edited, modified, or erased. By morning, his fears were confirmed — key surveys and datasets had vanished. With other crucial datasets soon to be taken offline, he then turned to preserving snapshots of the Food and ...