8 ms·

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 techni

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.

HeckFeck 11mo ago
[flagged]
- hsbauauvhabzb 11mo ago
  Cocaine is a hell of a drug
- attila-lendvai 11mo ago
  wait...! do you mean the commenter or the people in law enforcement?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
mattmaroon 11mo ago
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.
- attila-lendvai 11mo ago
  they removed it promptly. remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
  - Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
    > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - _vqpz 11mo ago
      There are very few guidelines listed there that this community actually follows
  - mattmaroon 11mo ago
    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.
    - mattmaroon 11mo ago
      Also, it’s quite possible that they normally simply ignore these requests and in this case, they removed it because of it mentioning law enforcement or potential lawsuits and coming from somebody who has the power to block their site from a lot of people. I’m not saying I know or believe that to be the case, I have no knowledge at all here, but it’s entirely possible archive ignores most of these requests and responded to this one.
cornholio 11mo ago
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.
- jordanb 11mo ago
  The FBI has a large archive of CSAM used for content ID: https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/ https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/ Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  This is probably the realm of intelligence agencies, who have less accountability and many reasons to eliminate public archives (primarily perception management).
- justin66 11mo ago
  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.
  - cornholio 11mo ago
    > 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.
amarcheschi 11mo ago
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)
breppp 11mo ago
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)
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- mchanson 11mo ago
  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.
  - breppp 11mo ago
    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.
    - user982 11mo ago
      > I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail" What were the repercussions of this: "FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-website-sharing-thousands-child-porn-images/79108346/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websi...)
      - breppp 11mo ago
        "The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves" "The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days" "There was no other way we could identify as many players" I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage. Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement
dude187 11mo ago
It's the same technique that people on Reddit use to take down subreddits that don't agree with the carefully curated "hive mind".
- iamnothere 11mo ago
  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.
  - j-bos 11mo ago
    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.
    - iamnothere 11mo ago
      Interesting, this may suppress reach of the video through something in the YT algorithm.
      - cocainemonster 11mo ago
        no, it's just self promotion. they instruct users to click their profile where the default video is a call to action to join a depraved discord server. you get messaged bestiality automatically once joining so sane and likeminded people get sorted quickly
      - rolph 11mo ago
        could be, but i think its similar to a bathroom wall, or physical bulleten board. a publicly facing space with no attribution, that can be linked to, and evade URL based filters of known hate speech projectors.
  - Levitz 11mo ago
    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.
aleph_minus_one 11mo ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  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.
  - AlikoDangote 11mo ago
    SF could be suicideforum
- phyzome 11mo ago
  KF would be KiwiFarms
  - vintermann 11mo ago
    They're under a CSAM flood/reporting attack themselves, according to their admin.
jm4 11mo ago
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.
txrx0000 11mo ago
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.
- mpalmer 11mo ago
  Great point. I guess one is just a better anti-privacy boogeyman.
  - _cenw 11mo ago
    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://harmblock.com/ https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_to_protect_kids_from_explicit_content-news-69120.php https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- supriyo-biswas 11mo ago
  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.
constantcrying 11mo ago
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.232155/ https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-gay-pedophile-at-the-gates....
- zahlman 11mo ago
  I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I think KF links get your post auto-killed...
- cyberdick 11mo ago
  this sort of stuff happened on reddit too but by a different moderator and his goons https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method
  - journoscum 11mo ago
    Your link says there's no actual evidence she did that.
msp26 11mo ago
https://saucenao.blogspot.com/2021/04/recent-events.html 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.
- sirreal14 11mo ago
  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/BR13181896/br-external/CanadianCentreForChildProtectionInc-REV-e.pdf https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-backgrounder https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-network-child-sexual-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...
- soniclettuce 11mo ago
  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.
  - _--__--__ 11mo ago
    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.
hulitu 11mo 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. 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.
ricksunny 11mo ago
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/1WdSlZK6q1EjdRWzWeKANbjOZV03UQwCT/view?usp=share_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WdSlZK6q1EjdRWzWeKANbjOZV03...
zahlman 11mo ago
> gets archive.is to crawl it Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only archived pages on request.
- cocainemonster 11mo ago
  archiving on request is still crawling, even if active, not passive
fsagx 11mo ago
KF/SaSu/SF ?
- efreak 11mo ago
  Check other comments, this was explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453
Longlius 11mo ago
KF is being spammed with CSAM currently to the point where registrations are closed unless the admins are online to manually watch new user regs. Seems to be the new tactic now.
- Sabinus 11mo ago
  KF being Kiwifarms the harassment site? Interesting, did it start happening after any particular event? Have the site admins posted about it publicly?
  - Longlius 11mo ago
    It's front page on the site currently.

HeckFeck 11mo ago

[flagged]

hsbauauvhabzb 11mo ago
Cocaine is a hell of a drug
attila-lendvai 11mo ago
wait...! do you mean the commenter or the people in law enforcement?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]

mattmaroon 11mo ago

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.

attila-lendvai 11mo ago
they removed it promptly. remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
- Wowfunhappy 11mo ago
  > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - _vqpz 11mo ago
    There are very few guidelines listed there that this community actually follows
- mattmaroon 11mo ago
  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.
  - mattmaroon 11mo ago
    Also, it’s quite possible that they normally simply ignore these requests and in this case, they removed it because of it mentioning law enforcement or potential lawsuits and coming from somebody who has the power to block their site from a lot of people. I’m not saying I know or believe that to be the case, I have no knowledge at all here, but it’s entirely possible archive ignores most of these requests and responded to this one.

cornholio 11mo ago

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.

jordanb 11mo ago
The FBI has a large archive of CSAM used for content ID: https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/ https://cybernews.com/editorial/war-on-child-exploitation/ Of course in a pinch it could also be used for other things like pretext.
iamnothere 11mo ago
This is probably the realm of intelligence agencies, who have less accountability and many reasons to eliminate public archives (primarily perception management).
justin66 11mo ago
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.
- cornholio 11mo ago
  > 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.

amarcheschi 11mo ago

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)

breppp 11mo ago

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)

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
mchanson 11mo ago
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.
- breppp 11mo ago
  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.
  - user982 11mo ago
    > I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail" What were the repercussions of this: "FBI ran website sharing thousands of child porn images" (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-website-sharing-thousands-child-porn-images/79108346/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-websi...)
    - breppp 11mo ago
      "The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves" "The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days" "There was no other way we could identify as many players" I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage. Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement

dude187 11mo ago

It's the same technique that people on Reddit use to take down subreddits that don't agree with the carefully curated "hive mind".

iamnothere 11mo ago
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.
- j-bos 11mo ago
  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.
  - iamnothere 11mo ago
    Interesting, this may suppress reach of the video through something in the YT algorithm.
    - cocainemonster 11mo ago
      no, it's just self promotion. they instruct users to click their profile where the default video is a call to action to join a depraved discord server. you get messaged bestiality automatically once joining so sane and likeminded people get sorted quickly
    - rolph 11mo ago
      could be, but i think its similar to a bathroom wall, or physical bulleten board. a publicly facing space with no attribution, that can be linked to, and evade URL based filters of known hate speech projectors.
- Levitz 11mo ago
  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.

aleph_minus_one 11mo ago

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctioned_Suicide

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
ACCount37 11mo ago
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.
- AlikoDangote 11mo ago
  SF could be suicideforum
phyzome 11mo ago
KF would be KiwiFarms
- vintermann 11mo ago
  They're under a CSAM flood/reporting attack themselves, according to their admin.

jm4 11mo ago

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.

txrx0000 11mo ago

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.

mpalmer 11mo ago
Great point. I guess one is just a better anti-privacy boogeyman.
- _cenw 11mo ago
  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://harmblock.com/ https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_to_protect_kids_from_explicit_content-news-69120.php https://www.gsmarena.com/hmd_fuse_debuts_with_harmblock_ai_t...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
supriyo-biswas 11mo ago
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.

constantcrying 11mo ago

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.232155/ https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-gay-pedophile-at-the-gates....

zahlman 11mo ago
I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I think KF links get your post auto-killed...
cyberdick 11mo ago
this sort of stuff happened on reddit too but by a different moderator and his goons https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method
- journoscum 11mo ago
  Your link says there's no actual evidence she did that.

msp26 11mo ago

https://saucenao.blogspot.com/2021/04/recent-events.html 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.

sirreal14 11mo ago
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/BR13181896/br-external/CanadianCentreForChildProtectionInc-REV-e.pdf https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/SECU/Brief/B... [1] https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-backgrounder https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-network-child-sexual-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/25/tor-netwo...
soniclettuce 11mo ago
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.
- _--__--__ 11mo ago
  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.

hulitu 11mo 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. 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.

ricksunny 11mo ago

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/1WdSlZK6q1EjdRWzWeKANbjOZV03UQwCT/view?usp=share_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WdSlZK6q1EjdRWzWeKANbjOZV03...

zahlman 11mo ago

> gets archive.is to crawl it Does archive.is actually do any crawling? I thought they only archived pages on request.

cocainemonster 11mo ago
archiving on request is still crawling, even if active, not passive

fsagx 11mo ago

KF/SaSu/SF ?

efreak 11mo ago
Check other comments, this was explained here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937453

Longlius 11mo ago

KF is being spammed with CSAM currently to the point where registrations are closed unless the admins are online to manually watch new user regs. Seems to be the new tactic now.

Sabinus 11mo ago
KF being Kiwifarms the harassment site? Interesting, did it start happening after any particular event? Have the site admins posted about it publicly?
- Longlius 11mo ago
  It's front page on the site currently.