Comment by supriyo-biswas
15 hours ago
Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations.
I first heard of this technique on a discussion on Lowendtalk from a hoster discussing how pressure campaigns were orchestrated.
The host used to host VMs for a customer that was not well liked but otherwise within the bounds of free speech in the US (I guess something on the order of KF/SaSu/SF), so a given user would upload CSAM on the forum, then report the same CSAM to the hoster. They used to use the same IP address for their entire operation. When the host and the customer compared notes, they'd find about these details.
Honestly at the time I thought the story was bunk, in the age of residential proxies and VPNs and whatnot, surely whoever did this wouldn't just upload said CSAM from their own IP, but one possible explanation would be that the forum probably just blocked datacenter IPs wholesale and the person orchestrating the campaign wasn't willing to risk the legal fallout of uploading CSAM out of some regular citizen's infected device.
In this case, I assume law enforcement just sets up a website with said CSAM, gets archive.is to crawl it, and then pressurize DNS providers about it.
They have plausible deniability, but the fact of the matter is: this also erases evidence of past crimes from public records. If bad things already happened then we should keep the evidence that they happened.
The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the actual act of child trafficking and rape. It's almost as if viewing (or this case, merely archiving) CSAM is considered a worse crime than the physical act of trafficking and sexually abusing children, which is apparently okay nowadays if you're rich or powerful enough.
> The root problem of CSAM is child trafficking and abuse in physical space. But for whatever reason enforcement efforts seem to be more focused on censoring and deleting the images rather than on curbing the actual act of child trafficking and rape.
Things get a bit uncomfortable for various high profile figures, political leaders and royalty if prosecutions start happening.
The people who make their living Caring A Lot would be out of a job without a constant fresh supply of things to be very concerned about.
A middle ground solution is for the admins to block the page with a message like "this page is unavailable due to reports of illegal content. if you work for a law enforcement agency and are considering using this as evidence, please contact us" for the preservation aspect.
The meta conspiracy theory in all of this would be that this is an actual CSAM producer trying to take down evidence that could be used against them.
It's very likely that it's someone trying to take down evidence, and since they have CSAM to upload, they would be in deep legal trouble themselves if they were identified.
It is however not at all clear the evidence they want scrubbed from the internet is CSAM-related. It's just the go-to tool for giving a site trouble for some attackers.
archive.today already takes down all reported CSAM? They explicitly don't want to archive it.
Great point. I guess one is just a better anti-privacy boogeyman.
It's also a great (VC-funded) business opportunity to become the technology provider of such action. There are a few of these non-profit fronts with "technology partners" behind them that are lobbying for legislation like the UK Online Safety Act or Chat Control. Thorn is the most well-known one, but one particularly interesting one is SafeToNet, who after not getting a government contract for CSAM scanning (and purging their marketing for it from the web - you can still find it under the name SafeToWatch) have pivoted to just selling a slightly altered version of their app preloaded on a $200 smartphone to concerned parents - with a 2.5x price premium.
https://harmblock.com/
https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...
https://saucenao.blogspot.com/2021/04/recent-events.html
Mildly related incident where a Canadian child protection agency uploads csam onto a reverse image search engine and then reports the site for the temporarily stored images.
This Canadian group (Canadian Centre for Child Protection) is awful. They simultaneously receive tax dollars while also being registered as a lobbyist, meaning Canadians are paying taxes to the government to lobby itself. Last year they lobbied in favor of Bill S-210 [0], which would bring Texas-style age verification of porn to Canada. Their latest campaign is to introduce censorship to Tor, they’re quite proud of this campaign [1] where they’re going after Tor in the popular media and attacking the Tor non-profit’s funding structure. [2] Learning that they upload child abuse images to try to then report take down internet services doesn’t surprise me in the least.
[0] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...
They were not uploading files. They were crawling the site with URLs that in turn made the search engine retrieve the CSAM and display it.
Still shitty, but more obviously a technical mistake than a deliberate ploy.
A mistake that they continued making for weeks or even months after being clearly informed by multiple reverse-image search providers of what they were doing.
When I accessed archive.ph (ordinary everyday content) during a visit to Italy last week, a legal notice loaded instead from Italy’s cyber authority saying they had blocked access domain-wide over CSAM. I suspected the same M.O. as parent comment describes was operative. I took a screenshot of the notice in case anyone’s interested. Edit: uploaded & available here https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WdSlZK6q1EjdRWzWeKANbjOZV03...
I've spent enough time on telegram to see this happening more times to ban groups. Csam shit storm, content gets flagged, the group gets banned (or at least, unavailable for some time)
> KF/SaSu/SF
SaSu: Sanctioned Suicide [1]
But I don't know what KF and SF are supposed to stand for.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide
KF is almost certainly KiwiFarms, an infamous gossip forum where terminally online mentally ill people come together to make fun of other terminally online mentally ill people. With a large amount of doxxing and harassment accusations being thrown at it. I think harassment is against the site rules, but doxxing isn't. The site, being what it is, got itself some serious enemies. Including people with enough influence in IT space to nearly get the entire site pulled off the web.
SF is probably StormFront, an infamous neo-nazi website. Not an "anyone right of center is a nazi" kind of neo-nazi - actual self-proclaimed neo-nazis, complete with swastikas, Holocaust denial and calls for racial segregation. Even more hated and scrutinized than KiwiFarms, and under pressure by multiple governments and many more activist groups, over things like neo-nazi hate speech and ties with real life hate groups.
It would be a damn shame if archive.is fell under the same kind of scrutiny as those. I have an impression, completely unfounded, that the archive.is crew knew things were heading that way, and worked with that in mind for a long time now. But that doesn't guarantee they'll endure. Just gives them a fighting chance.
SF could be suicideforum
KF would be KiwiFarms
They're under a CSAM flood/reporting attack themselves, according to their admin.
That would work but it is a very risky technique. For the mere mortal in your example this means possible jail time just to get some site closed down.
For law enforcement personnel, at the very least would mean an end of a career if caught (also possible jail time)
The current federal government in the USA actively encourages federal agents to use illegal and unethical methods, and promised them protection and immunity.
State governments too. I heard a state judge once say "Of course police are permitted to break the law if they are investigating criminals."
The current federal government of France? Of the EU? The article is not about the USA.
8 replies →
Law enforcement has already done such things and I've never heard of consequences for it.
You could use something that is legal in one country, and illegal in another country, for example, an anime-style drawing of a young girl, or a textual description.
You are naive about cops, at least in the US, and what they will or will not do and what consequence they may or may not face.
Indeed, if you're paying attention to local news in Massachusetts, you might be shocked, or not, that cops from Canton, Boston, and the Massachusetts state police, and the county District Attorney, and judges, are all complicit in railroading a woman who was dating a cop who was likely killed by another cop. The web of deceit is so thick, it can't have been just for this one case. It must be long-standing and pervasive and there must be many victims. It's also unlikely that Massachusetts is the worst place in the US in this respect.
5 replies →
I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail" or "Cop work computer was found filled with child porn"
Anything linked to pedophilia in the US and elsewhere is without remorse, and will continue that way due to parental fears.
20 replies →
It’s the digital equivalent of a dirty cop planting a gun after shooting a suspect. Of course it happens. Three letter agencies probably do things like this all the time. Half of their legitimate work is probably illegal to begin with.
I doubt they’d have to. If the site truly doesn’t remove CSAM automatically I’ve no doubt plenty of it would end up there organically. You wouldn’t have to upload any anywhere, you’d only need to know some URLs to look for which presumably any major law enforcement agency would.
they removed it promptly.
remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
I read the whole thing you just didn’t understand my comment. That’s my fault because I left out one word, “automatically”. Fixed it.
The person to whom I was replying thought that perhaps someone wanting to stop Archive was uploading CSAM and getting them to crawl it. I was pointing out that they didn’t have to do the first step, the internet has lots of that stuff apparently, they merely had to have a list of urls (law enforcement could easily provide) and check Archive for them.
Archive doesn’t do this automatically apparently, as some platforms do, so there’s probably plenty of it there.
1 reply →
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1 reply →
The owner of the KiwiFarms goes into detail how the attack against his site works and where the residential IPs are from:
"The bot spammer
- Started his attack by simply DDoS attacking the forum.
- Uses thousands of real email addresses from real providers like gmail, outlook, and hotmail.
- Uses tens of thousands of VPN IPs.
- He also uses tens of thousands of IPs from "Residential Private Networks", which are "free" VPN services that actually sell your IP address to spammers so that their activity cannot be identified as coming from a commercial service provider.
- Is able to pass off all CAPTCHA providers to CAPTCHA solvers to bypass anti-bot challenges.
- Is completely lifeless and dedicated to this task. Publicly posted invites were found and used by him, and after a full month of no engagement he noticed registrations were open within hours."
Source: https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-gay-pedophile-at-the-gates....
I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I think KF links get your post auto-killed...
> gets archive.is to crawl it
Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only archived pages on request.
archiving on request is still crawling, even if active, not passive
It's the same technique that people on Reddit use to take down subreddits that don't agree with the carefully curated "hive mind".
I don’t know why you are downvoted, this is absolutely what happened semi-frequently until Reddit was finally forced to crack down on it. The same thing happened on Twitter/X for a while where bots would mass reply to targeted users with gore and CSAM.
Because even though it definitely happened, it's one of those things you cannot prove and that don't really get recorded anywhere.
It also doesn't help that there is not even a time reference here. I want to say somewhere around 2018? Maybe earlier? Gamergate era? CTR?
There are pieces of internet history which are a "either you were there or you weren't" kind of deal. Like how the implementation of image posts in Reddit was very controversial, with concerns of the quality of the site going down. Wrong side won that one.
1 reply →
I've been seeing something similar on some youtube videos, endless unflagged comments advocating hatred and violence, completely unrelated to the video topic or channel.
3 replies →
It's still regularly used by the "mafia" controlling large parts of Reddit. You can simply buy these services on sites like BHW and Swapd.
I downvoted it because it's commonly said by people who do bad things, as a red herring. "People from your subreddit keep killing people" "Well at least we're not infected by the woke mind virus"/"You can't accuse us of that just because we don't agree with the hivemind"/etc. It's no different from "but her emails" etc.
6 replies →
KF/SaSu/SF ?
Check other comments, this was explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453
> Its interesting that being unable to find a legal route to dig up dirt on archive.is, they're going the route of CSAM allegations.
This looks like someone in US (because FBI + CSAM) does not like them.
A lot of "sensitive" content is behind paywalls in the "free press" so someone, possibly FBI, wants to suppress this info.
[flagged]
wait...! do you mean the commenter or the people in law enforcement?
Cocaine is a hell of a drug
It's unlikely law enforcement would take the risk to handle CSAM just to make a case against a Russian pirate, jeopardizing their careers and freedom, when the copyright case is pretty strong already.
These are the doings of one of the myriad freelance "intelectual rights enforcement agents", which are paid on success and employed by some large media organization. Another possibility is that a single aggrieved individual who found themselves doxed or their criminal conviction archived etc. took action after failing to enforce their so called "right to be forgotten".
Unfortunately, archive.is operating model is uniquely vulnerable to such false flag attacks.
It’s grimly hilarious that anyone in 2025 believes the police wouldn’t do something because that thing is unethical and against their own standards.
> handle CSAM
They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.
Andrew Bustamante has stated that the CIA "supplies" people with such material.
https://youtu.be/fu6bYPTp_kE?si=K_YKzTxy5ggKQDiG&t=2156
> They wouldn’t “handle” it, they’d have some third party do their dirty work.
Without proof, that's just an edgelord conspiracy theory.
Police are not the Borg, perfectly coordinated in their evilness, all law enforcement agencies have internal power structures and strife, rivalries, jealousy, old conflicts. The fact that some action, such as planting evidence leading to a conviction, is punishable with long prison sentences, is not something the corrupt can simply afford to ignore, while giving their internal foes mortal leverage against them.
For example, if Kash Patel receives an order from his handlers to plant child porn on some political target, that outcome might happen or not, but what you can be pretty damn sure is that all those involved will be aware of the risks and will try their best to stay out of it, or, if coerced, do it covertly so as to minimize the extreme risks they face.
The point was not that FBI are a bunch of angels, but that the undeniable risks involved by such a move seem completely unnecessary - the FBI has for years been weaponized against overseas copyright infringers, openly and legally.
2 replies →
The FBI has a large archive of CSAM used for content ID:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/
Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.
This is probably the realm of intelligence agencies, who have less accountability and many reasons to eliminate public archives (primarily perception management).