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Yeah, basically. 4chan's admins have been working with the police for many years because of the questionable shit that gets posted on /b/ (child porn, murder threats/evidence, suicidal posts, etc.) They would have been shut down years ago if they weren't cooperating.

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The way I've heard this story in the past was specifically that anon did the unswirl and then tipped off the police. But seeing as that isn't mentioned on wiki (and not uber keen to google about), I guess it's probably not the case.

In the modern world we have a new class of difficult to obtain information. I know how to find the answer to my question, but not without exposing myself to information that I do not want.

Someone linked the relevant case elsewhere in the discussion, and apparently it was a computer expert working for the German police that did the unswirling (which is about what I remember from the news at the time): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Paul_Neil

Going on around '09 it was pretty common to have pornography posted with the same type of swirl or other manipulations. It was a game to undo it, using a particular piece of software.

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