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Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

I'm quite certain there's lots of effort world-wide to stop child trafficking and rape. So I ask: Does it only seem that there's more focus on censorship? Or is there actually?

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...

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....

this sort of stuff happened on reddit too but by a different moderator and his goons https://www.markdownpaste.com/document/bardfinn-method

Your link says there's no actual evidence she did that.

I understand the value of providing evidence here, but I think KF links get your post auto-killed...

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.

The FBI is the primary party appearing to be in this investigation, and to the best of my knowledge are both of the US (govt), and are federal. (I'm not a US person so please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Isn't a simpler explanation that the FBI was co-opted in the same way as Adguard, rather than that the FBI is masterminding the scheme?

> The current federal government of France? Of the EU? The article is not about the USA.

Are you sure ? They say in the article that they were not able to fing out who sent the email. Site was behind Cloudfare (so US).

Does Cloudflare only allow US customers?

France doesn't have a federal government, as it's not a federation.

Yes, I know that.

This article is specifically an article about an investigation by the FBI- US federal agents.

The article mentions the FBI investigation but is not about that. This article is about a pressure campaign, the letter Web Abuse Association Defense sent to adguard making threats under french law and adguard's investigation in response to that letter.

Which was what my parent comment referred to. Comments replying to mine act like it's unreasonable for me to talk about US federal agents in the context of this subject, when those are what the article mentions specifically, many times.

A French organization with an English name, writing in English? J'en doute.

It was exceptionally clear from reading their writing, they are NOT native English speakers.

It seems 57% of people in France can speak English, which I can easily believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

No reason to doubt this is coming from a French person.

Very many European citizens speak English and it's the lingua franca* of the Internet.

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.

Can you provide link at least? I am not sure what railroading a person involves..

They are referring to how there’s a belief in some parts of Massachusetts that the police are trying to frame Karen Reid for the death of John O Keefe (0). At its climax it was all over the news, it was discussed at a lot of water coolers, and there were even billboards bought by the highway to show support and draw attention to the court case.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_O%27Keefe

The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and jarring; step counts, battery temperature, automobile software, Ring cameras...wow.

Railroading is essentially coercing/bullying someone into a situation or doing something with a connotation of things being taken too far, very quickly, using overwhelming force… like a train.

The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.

The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?

I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.

They're referring to the Karen Read case.

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.

Seizing control of criminal websites is literally standard procedure. Three letter agencies are known for hacking their way into criminal platforms and keeping them running for as long as possible. They justify it as an opportunity to catch high value targets. They're quite willing to literally distribute CSAM from their own servers for months, years on end if that's what it takes. They don't just react either, they are very proactive. They start their own CSAM communuties to entrap criminals. So called honeypots.

It's a recurring theme with these authorities. You see, they're special. They get to spread this sort of material with complete impunity. They get to stockpile cyberweapons and use them against the targets of their investigations, or even indiscriminately. If you do it, you're a hacker spreading malware. They're just doing their jobs.

Sometimes those two privileges collide, resulting in truly comical and absurd situations. FBI has allowed cases against child molesters to go down the drain because the judge ordered them to reveal some Firefox exploit they used. They didn't want to invalidate their "network investigative techniques".

It's even more legally funny than this. They are also allowed to enact entrapment to some degree and it passed court muster in the US. That because it's extremely hard to use it as a defence.

Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people. There's also Article 6 of ECHR.

In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.

> 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-websi...)

I think there’s a difference between leaving a CP site up for two weeks so you can track the users, versus actively posting CP on legal websites for the purpose of blackmailing third parties into blocking them (“The Bardfinn Method”).

"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

How about "The President was close friends with a known child sexual predator and his entire government spends a significant amount of time covering up their connections because it seems fairly obvious the president fucked teenagers and then fomented a coup and put literal criminals and felons in his cabinet so no one would hold him accountable while destroying the nation's economy and starting wars nobody can even understand"

And that and other pedophile linked conspiracy theories (pizzagate) had huge ramifications in these elections

pizzagate = not real, what I just said is not a conspiracy theory.

The jeffery epstein case is real, however the narrative created is similar to pizzagate

"world elite is practicing a child sex ring", this is why it's so compatible with the current vogue bipartisan populism which generally says "your life sucks because of the rich/elites"

jeffery epstein was in reality associated with many politicians, including trump and clinton, as far as I can tell on both sides there is a lot of extrapolation as to what really happened

> "world elite is practicing a child sex ring"

On pure numbers alone, this is practically guaranteed to be the case for a portion of the world elite, since statistically speaking at least 1% ~ 2% of them will be pedophiles. Same as any community, anywhere. The average child sex ring is probably made up of individuals about as wealthy and sophisticated as your dad, uncle, neighbour, boss or your friends, and if even they can pull it off then surely the global elite can.

With Epstein the is plenty that did happen that remains unaddressed and is completely factual. Eg The-Man-Formerly-Know-As-Prince-Andrew. He is a child rapist.

Quite why the now dead queen supported him so much (presumably including the payouts) is baffling.

I am imagining the consequences of that headline and there are none. If you disagree maybe you should imagine some of the real headlines that have occurred lately and check your imagination against reality. Federal agents are actively encouraged to violate your civil and constitutional rights. Those consequences live only in your imagination

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.

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.

True, but to be fair, it’s very difficult to document something like this in a way that both provides hard proof and avoids serious felony charges.

>Because even though it definitely happened, it's one of those things you cannot prove and that don't really get recorded anywhere.

How do you know that it definitely happened?

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.

Interesting, this may suppress reach of the video through something in the YT algorithm.

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

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.

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 don’t know why you are downvoted, this is absolutely what happened semi-frequently until Reddit was finally forced to crack down on it.

What subreddits got banned because of that?

>The same thing happened on Twitter/X for a while where bots would mass reply to targeted users with gore and CSAM.

Did any of those targeted users get banned for this or was it just a form of harassment?

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.

If there was one thing I could make people understand: Even though bad people are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't true.

Social media false flag tactics happen. People from all over all sorts of political spectrums tell the same story. The sites tell the same story.

If you decide to blindly dismiss claims of abuse because you don't like the ones claiming to be abused, you create a comfy little space for abuse to happen.

Is there any evidence that reddit banned subreddits because of those spammers? Did the reddit admins make a statement?

> Even though bad people are saying it, doesn't mean it isn't true.

I am a human being and therefore have a built-in Bayesian filter for spam and bullshit. Should I also read Nigerian prince emails, just in case there's a real Nigerian prince who needs my help?

In case you are a real Nigerian prince who needs my help, it's up to you not to phrase it identically to a spam email.

You're choosing to disbelieve people because you don't like them. You would have believed them if you liked them and they said the same thing, because if you've spent any time at all online you know it happens.

That's not the same as disbelieving an anonymous spammer. Your distrust of them does not stem from disliking them.

To me, your attitude seems like indifference to the truth: I think you know that this happens, and it would be VERY odd if it only happened to people you like, but you're just indifferent when it happens to people you don't like, so you disbelieve them out of spite.

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.

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.

> 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

There are very few guidelines listed there that this community actually follows

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.

KF being Kiwifarms the harassment site? Interesting, did it start happening after any particular event? Have the site admins posted about it publicly?

It's front page on the site currently.

> 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

> 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.

KF/SaSu/SF ?

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

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.

In this case we’re talking about asking someone like a confidential informant to paste a URL into a text field on a web site. Not really elaborate in the grand scheme of things, conspiracy-wise.

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).

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