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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

The subpoena cites the following statute as authorization: "(1)(A) In any investigation of (i)(I) a Federal health care offense; or (II) a Federal offense involving the sexual exploitation or abuse of children, the Attorney General; or (ii) an offense under section 871 or 879, or a threat against a person protected by the United States Secret Service under paragraph Secret Service determines that the threat constituting the offense or the threat against the person protected is imminent"

One of the agents named in the subpoena appears to have previously worked on child exploitation cases years ago:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-6039/245948/202...

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Now that might be an interesting angle.

1. Put up CSAM on your unlisted domain briefly.

2. Archive page and delete site.

3. Send people archive link.

I can confirm that (something similar to that) is what regularly occurs to share CSAM.

Have dealt with content from when I was ~11 on Omegle appearing across the internet for years at this point (NCMEC is an amazing resource).

Archive sites are regularly abused by bad actors.

Here is real example on archive.is:

https://archive.is/https://ezgif.com/maker/*

I submitted multiple complaints to NCMEC but didn’t get results. Germany, though, was able to get the archives purged.

On the page, you will see the text:

> In response to a request we received from 'jugendschutz.net' the page is not currently available.

I think owner mentioned in a blog post (or on twitter?) this is indeed happening, but I forgot the exact wording to google it.

UPD Found this by googling "site:blog.archive.today abuse":

https://blog.archive.today/post/117011183286/yesterday-i-did... (2015)

That seems like something that should be handled with a simple takedown request and those behind archive.is would almost certainly comply. 99.999% of people using archive.is are using it to bypass news article paywalls nothing more. Which, if we're honest, is the real reason why the FBI is going after them.

Personal anecdote but I almost never use these archive sites to bypass paywalls. I only use it when I want to see how establishment news sites somehow sometimes accidentally tell the truth, then, when they get the call, they try to purge their original reporting. Again, it might be my personal bias, but in my opinion, this is the main reason they are going after them. Because these websites let people prove the hypocrisy and the lies.

I remember that when[0] Reuters took down that one story about organized crime, and further DMCA'd the Internet Archive to take down their version, archive.ORG cheerfully did the memory-hole thing—while archive.IS stayed up.

If the (Western) internet were to turn into a monoculture of Western-domiciled big corporations, that kind of censorship would be *effective*. Our systems aren't robust against bad-faith actors attacking the free flow of information. (And the root cause of the planet-spanning censorship cascade in that example was, unambigiously, bad actors. A crime syndicate based in India).

The fact the internet is global and freely connects to legal jurisdictions and cultures very different from the West's, is to the West's benefit: it creates an escape-hatch for things that fall between the cracks of our nascent totalitarian technologies.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39065981#39065996 ("A Judge in India Prevented Americans from Seeing a Blockbuster Report")

If the feds want to take someone down, one of the dirty tricks is to use CSAM as a pretext for an investigation and subpoenas.

Is this legal? I see what you are saying from a practical standpoint, but in terms of procedure, there are federal agents who are empowered to spread such material for these purposes? It seems crazy.

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