I think the e-mail exchange should've been kept short, although it is good that the owner of archive.today was eventually notified (by them) about these links in good faith to remove them. Their reply should've been the following:

"Thank you for contacting us. If you have conclusive proof of illegal behavior, you should contact police and seek legal assistance. A website's administrator is expected to adequately react to illegal actions conducted by its users, such as removing media that's breaking a law.

We have visited the URLs provided by you (https://archive[.]today/ , ...) and found no evidence to corroborate your concerns. To avoid misunderstandings, we require you to send a certified mail to <Adguards company address> before further replies on this matter."

Remember guys, it should always be certified mail (bonus points for international). And yes, I mean literal index pages as provided in the first e-mail. Play by the legal understanding of words. Be creative and break the rules to the extent of not breaking them ;)

PS: If you want to see more of "funny replies" you should read Njalla's blog (<https://njal.la/blog/>) and TPB's infamous e-mail replies.

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[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250112153727/https://webabused...

Then they will come after our local storage, and making it prohibitively expensive is the least malign way they can come up with.

1. WAAD has developed a good way of detecting CSAM, but is ok with the CSAM staying available longer than it needs to, and remaining accessible to a wider audience than needed, in order to pursue their ulterior motive. In this case, they could be improving the world in some significant way, but are just choosing to do something else.

2. WAAD has intentionally had archive.today index CSAM material in order to pursue their ulterior motive.

Of course, option 2 is _much_ more damning than option 1, but I feel both are really bad, and naively I'd still expect option 1 to be illegal. If you know of a crime and intentionally hide it, that seem illegal.

As of writing, they have a public response hosted on their website, including screenshots of emails to/from Google with URLs that Google agreed to remove. WAAD censored out the URLs, except they didn't actually because whatever paintbrush tool they used didn't have the opacity maxed out.

I'm not looking up those URLs to find out.

edit: They also leaked the Adguard admin's email, which WAAD complained about being the victim of.

This law is completely backwards, and worse than a SLAPP. If you cannot respond to a report in any way, it should be null.

That in itself is quite shocking really.

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.

What stops them from forcing Chrome to block the website, or LetsEncrypt to not issue any more certificates for the domain, or Microsoft and Apple to add them to their firewalls? Hell, can they go after the infrastructure software developers and say, force nginx to add a check and refuse to serve the domain?

Then what happens when a fake report is sent to an open source project without budget for lawyers?

2. Is it a legally allowed tactic for copyright-luvva's to intentionally seek out CSAM content online, and then submit those URL's to sites like archive.today? Which entity is at greater legal peril, the one that aids the distribution of CSAM materials by intentionally having a site like archive.today archive CSAM content, or archive.today unintentionally being tricked into archiving CSAM content?

3. Everyone has traumas, of one kind of another. Each deals or tries to deal with them in their own way. Suppose a victim of crimes (still unpunished) finds or is informed of the presence of evidence online, and suppose this victim (regardless of how representative) finds the preservation of this evidence more important than the humiliation associated with it, how (in)just are laws that blanket suppress CSAM material? To give a more vigorous example: imagine you were raped by some no-yet-fallen UK nobility, and you are made aware of the presence of this evidence on some royal FTP server (or whatever), and you succeed in having archive.today "notarize" this evidence (independently from legal channels, since theres a suspiciously low amount of nobility being convicted, in contrast to your personal experience). These rules for supressing CSAM can be wielded as a sword precisely against those who fell prey to perpetrators...

It's the equivalent of burning a library down because books have records of the truth.

Adguard deserves the highest praise for publicizing this attack on them.

https://webabusedefense.com/presse/Communiquer_presse_Aff-Ad... [pdf]

I think it's very telling that the WAAD people don't mention that last bit in their response[0] - unless archive.today rotates their DKIM records, the messages would be verifiably signed. This of course means you can't just make stuff up, which is likely what they did.

[0] https://archive.ph/MCt4g

Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.

Maybe folks should start calling eachother out?

Immediately reminded me of patio11's amazing write up[1] of debanking, featuring banks being deputized as law enforcement for financial crimes (which is completely non controversial), and even used as a convenient tool to regulate other industries that the white house didn't like (kinda controversial).

[1]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...

Also the site is pretty advanced, it can handle complicated sites and even social networks.

> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls

How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper?

> Unfortunately, we couldn’t dig any deeper about who exactly is behind WAAD.

That's a red flag. Why would an NGO doing work for the public hide its founder(s) and information about itself? Using NGOs to suggest/promote/lobby certain decisions is a well known trick in authoritarian countries to pretend the idea is coming from "the people", not from the government. I hope nobody falls for such tricks today.

Furthermore, they seem to have no way to donate them money. That's even the redder flag.

Also France doesn't have a good reputation in relation to the observing rule of law. For example, they arrested Russian agent^w enterpreneur Durov, owner of Telegram, claiming they have lot of evidence against him involved in drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering [1], but a year later let him free (supposedly after he did what they wanted). France also bars popular unwanted candidates from elections. Both these cases strongly resemble what Russia does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...

It is incorrect to say the FBI has subpoenad the register for Archive.is. The FBI can not subpoena the register for .is domains, since there is only one and it is Icelandic. US subpoenas have no power outside the US.

So they are going after another of Archive.is domains, just not the Icelandic one.

It is even more interesting the US government is coming after archive.today at the same time, or maybe that is just a coincidence, and this is just a tech-savvy philanderer trying to hide something from his wife.

Oh, so a chatbot wrote this article. Glad it tipped its hand early enough I didn't waste that much time.

Curious if others are seeing this kind of “shadow regulation” pop up more frequently elsewhere — especially in email filtering, CDN layers, and AI content moderation.

They upload themselves pages with the bad content for then complains about it. Probably they know that no one will care to block or snitch on the website if it is just because it is used to "snapshot" newspaper posts, but CSAM is evil so that is the good excuse to badmouth a service like that.

Similar to what is used currently in Europe to undermine our rights or the cia operation to burn Julian Assange.

Everything else aside, this is a big issue for archive.today and makes it very difficult to defend its continued existence. Crap.

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

I dream of a day where archivebox becomes a fleet of homelabs all over the world making it drastically harder to block them all.

"Hi,

These do appear to be quite serious crimes. I've sent all the URLs, your email address, emails and responses to the relevant law agencies.

Regards, AdGuard"

If adguard starts blocking certain domains users actually want to access, users will simply switch off of adguard. No one uses adguard as a resolver by default, they switch to adguard to block ads. This seems like it'd be a pretty ineffective way of blocking sites users actually want to access.

While the NextDNS company is registered in Delaware, the founders are French nationals, so may feel more exposed to such threats.

fwiw, you can use rewrites for these domains in the nextdns settings, or manage it in your local dns client, and get around this pretty easily.

recently, a company founder / ceo swore up and down right here on this orange website that they never said the word "forever" on their pricing page until someone brought proof using a web archive.

If the US government is behind this nonsense, I am very displeased by it. I wish there was a way we could stop the FBI from doing this kind of tomfoolery.

See also: trying to strongarm Apple into running local scans on everybody’s devices and telling Apple not to listen to its customers.

It's sickening to see people okay with the destruction of the "real" knowledge filled internet in favor of a dystopia.