Comment by e2le
11 hours ago
>They replied within a few hours. The response was straightforward: the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was), and they had never received any previous notifications about those URLs.
They never notified archive.today of the illegal material, instead they chose to demand blocking actions of archive.today from a DNS provider. I would be interested to know whether any other DNS service providers have received similar such demands.
I would assume (like any normal individual), that you would notify the service first (archive.today) and if they've proven to be a non-responder to CSAM material then escalate to legal action.
If archive.today is honest about never receiving a prior notification, then the way in which they've decided to go about removing the illegal material is very suspicious.
Generally if you encounter CSAM you should report to your countries appropriate organisation. Skip the police and go straight there to save everyone some time and avoid confusion. This agency will handle notifications etc to the site.
USA - https://report.cybertip.org/reporting
UK - https://report.iwf.org.uk/org/ (technically the NCA, but they are a catch all reporting target. As a private individual IWF will handle the onward report for you).
If you are in a country without such an agency, the above agencies are good to inform, as they will both handle international reports.
These organisations will ensure the material is taken down, and will capture and analyse it. CSAM can be compared against hash databases (https://www.thorn.org/) to determine whether there it is as yet unknown material or reshared known material. This can help lead to the identification, arrest, and conviction of material creators as well as the identification and support of victims.
If you tell the site administrator directly there is a good chance they will remove the material and not report it; this is a huge problem in this space at the moment.
In the UK and the USA (and many other places) operators are obligated to report the material; in fact the controversial Online Safety Act puts actual teeth around this very obligation in the UK.
The explanation seems a bit incoherent for this case of a french entity.
Assuming the complainant has some genuine tip,
Which court would actually determine it to be illegal conclusively? (It can’t be a uk or us court, could it?)
And who issues the binding order to take it down from the known sites?
One might even go so far to insinuate that they were the party responsible for the CSAM being there to begin with. Wouldn't be the first time someone weaponized such content. I remember at least one case were a steamer was "digitally" swatted using a Dropbox upload link.
The fake abuse reports coming to IP addresses hosting TOR relays (not exits) might be same group trying to pollute the commons.
If the world ran by conspiracy theories, the goal would be to normalize censorship at DNS level. Sony has tried (>2 years ago) by taking Quad9 to court over a copyright matter. There are too many parties involved for whom this practice would be a useful tool to have.