The battle began to protect American data

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Three years ago, Sebastian Magresluich, a German historian and data scientist, began a stunning rescue mission. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he participated in establishing a network of their fellow obsessive-thirds Save the digital records of Ukraine.

Magresluich, a Bosnian heritage, was partially inspired by how Citizens in Sarajevo were bravely saved, under fire, from their national library when it was burned in 1992. “They should not be destroyed.”

Very very. Now he installed this playing book for an unexpected new task – in the United States. Since the opening of President Donald Trump, his administration has launched an amazing attack on parts of the American statistical base, through budget cuts, neglect, cultural wars and more.

Majstorovic participated in establishing Data saving project To work with other networks such as Access to the research data and preservation Try to save this information. “The Americans (volunteers) had helped us before with Ukraine, so I feel it is the duty to restore charity,” he explains.

It is a ridiculous historical development. In the late twentieth century, US government Often, it glorifies the importance of a reliable and transparent statistical ecosystem to support civil values ​​(including democracy), protection from tyranny, trade trade and capital markets.

But during the first period of Trump in his position, his team Introduction to Statistics Office – Folk Government officials. This time about the assault is much worse: in recent months, data on issues ranging from the census to Covid-19 to climate trends have disappeared, completely or temporarily disappeared, or has been partially withholding.

Funding discounts It undermines more data collection on labor and inflation markets, pushing an alert from economists and statistics in Wall Street. Meanwhile, the “Great and Beautiful” Trump Bill is characterized by a proposed budget that can be destroyed – if not shining – Financial Reports OfficeA 2008 financial crisis after the 2008 financial crisis to track the risks of stability. This, in turn, may mistake the so -called SOFR index that replaced Libor as a lending standard.

And why? The question is to arouse hot debate – conspiracy theories. Trump officials tell me that they want to repair Data The ecosystem to adapt to a rapidly changed world. This is not a crazy idea: America’s statistics have deficiency aspects, as shown in a strong book coming, America slideand From Jin Ludwig, a former financial organizer, and Progress From the economist Diane Coyle.

But what is frustrated is the lack of any repair strategy; The only unified feature seems to be a cleansing of the symbols that Maga hates, such as climate change or diversity.

Thus, on the right or error, many statistics blame the sabotage of clumsy by the alleged government efficiency Ministry, or even the desire of some Trump advisors to crush civil society. Some also fear that the private sector technology elites want data in their hands, although there is no difficult evidence for this. However, recent reports on Palantir’s increasing use of the White House of Government work, or efforts made by the Elon Musk team to download cabinet data, have fueled such fears.

In both cases, it is clear that if the data is weak, you will not only undermine the knowledge and civil life, but also trade. It is a very bad idea to undermine, for example, Weather tracking section As the hurricane season approaches, or to cancel off with the high risk of financial stability.

Hence the task adopted by Magresovic and hundreds of others, inside and outside America. The popular volunteer network has started to automatically capture the data threatened this spring. Now they are trying to coordinate and preserve their efforts to create and preserve the historical series of the historical series.

Their data rescue follows that the threatened series related to the Centers for Disease Control, the Statistics Office, the National Hurricane Center, the Geological Survey and the Consumer Finance Protection Office have already turned into the “Shadow” series available to the public. Work is underway.

This is not a magic stick against sabotage: some of the missing data and the network resources are restricted. Majstorovic is currently collecting donations to rent enough cloud storage to download data collections from various agencies, which have not yet been preserved because of their huge size.

However, no matter how incomplete, such efforts are important. One of the reasons is that the United States needs good statistics – as I hope that the Trump team will know very much. In fact, small policy attacks occurred recently: Some patent data threatened by budget discounts had been temporarily re -drafted this year after the protests, says Matt Marx, Professor Cornell.

The other reason that concerns him, however, is that it appears that people are fighting quietly to defend the basic civil values, inside and outside America. One scientist says: “We say not only cry – choose something related to your skills.” The shouting of the heroic, (mostly) hidden obsessive.

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