Machiavelli warned Princes about the danger of being an 'unarmed prophet.'

He might similarly warn you about being an 'unfunded revolutionary.'

I'm not name dropping, but I have exchanged emails with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, and he's taken a couple of my ideas under advisement.

Simon Bolivar was an 'unfunded revolutionary.' Under-funded for many of his campaigns, anyways. His exploits show that one can also derive significant energy from a general environment of horrendous suck.

The biggest problem would seem to be either liberating the raw data from Google or finding someone who still has readable archives.

Google has a 'captcha' on Google Groups which prevents mass copying. There is a guy with those tapes, but they're the early 80s - I don't know where Dejanews got their original archives. But that guy would be a start.

When I had a Giganews account I looked at how far back their text groups went, and I think they went back to 2003, but that was a couple of years ago. Might be worth looking at EasyNews or Giganews, at least for more recent history.

Don't some ISPs still have their own USENET servers?

Those servers only store a few weeks of posts at most; they won't help you recover anything from 1981-2008.

Or just wait for Google to fix it, I guess.