From the article, the penalty for a false report:
> ...shall be punished by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of €15,000.
Side note, would anybody know how "easily" do political elites get off the hook in France?
The actual ex-president got sentenced to jail time last month (and even served some of it) so you're at least not guaranteed to escape the law as a political elite.
"He will be subject to strict judicial supervision and barred from leaving France ahead of an appeal trial due to be held next year."
They post CSAM to some service/site, then immediately report it to every possible contact of the site's hosting provider, DNS provider, DDoS protection provider, etc. But not the site itself.
Before they do that, they spend weeks probing the site's moderation response, to work out the best time to evade detection on the site itself.
Then they do it again, and again, and again. They fight against the site's attempt to block them.
Their intent is to _deliberately_ get the site into trouble, and ultimately get the site's hosting, DNS, peering, etc. to abandon it.
The same sort of shitstains also persistently DDoS the site.
Why do they do it? Usually minor and petty internet squabbles, the instigator hates the site and wants to destroy the site, and uses these underhand tactics to do it.
They have no legal way to get what they want -- destroy someone else's site for their own pleasure -- so they use illegal ways. https://protectthestack.org/
In order to pull off this attack the attacker would have to have a collection of CSAM to upload. What if the site being attacked logged the uploader’s IP and went above-and-beyond complying with authorities and provided the source of the upload.
Well, I guess some people doing this sort of thing would try to hide their identity while doing the upload. Honestly, in that case… it might be reasonable for sites to not accept uploads via things like TOR, right? (Or however else these people hide their tracks).
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.
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.
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?
Making the report is a long way off court action, and it would be unusual for a court to be involved. In most cases the data is connected, documented, and site owners contacted and educated.
Very few countries see accidental/unintentional hosting as a crime (it will fail most reasonableness tests) and fewer are interested in prosecuting one off offenders who can just be asked to stop.
Most countries are very interested in prosecuting the underlying creators and finding and supporting the victims.
So I should report that I consumed child porn? That's a hard pass from me.
If you are consuming or encountering CSAM in a fashion where it is not clear that you are not seeking it out and participating in its acquisition and distribution I suggest that you seek both medical and legal help.
"... the illegal content would be removed (and we verified that it was)"
That doesn't mean it was CSAM, though obviously it's a serious possibility.