Notes / 26 Jul 2026

The law's own pages are in the archive now

Every target in this archive so far has been a company: privacy policies, security pages, App Store labels. As of today there are two exceptions — the European Commission and the European Parliament. Not because they scan anything, but because they write the rules, and what they say about the rules lives on web pages that can be edited like anyone else's.

Two documents joined the daily snapshot: DG HOME's child sexual abuse policy page — the Commission's own framing of what "voluntary detection" is and why it should continue — and the Parliament's legislative-train file for the draft CSA Regulation, the page that tracks how close "Chat Control 2.0" is to becoming law. If the framing shifts, or the draft lurches toward mandatory scanning, the edit becomes a dated, diffable, citable event.

One detail worth recording: the Parliament's status tracker sits behind an anti-bot wall. Our archiver identifies itself honestly by default, and for that it received a challenge page instead of the content; only a browser identity got through. A page that exists to tell the public where a surveillance law stands is defended against automated reading. We note it without further comment — the note is the comment.

The same rules apply as everywhere else in the archive: fetched daily at 06:17 UTC, hashed, diffed, committed to public git history, never edited after capture. Institutions get no scanning status — they aren't providers — but they get the same tripwire. The explainer shows where these pages fit in the larger machine.

— ScanRecords, 26 Jul 2026. Subscribe by RSS · corrections