Our investigation into the suspicious pressure on Archive.today
65 comments
·November 15, 2025supriyo-biswas
breppp
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)
UniverseHacker
The current federal government in the USA actively encourages federal agents to use illegal and unethical methods, and promised them protection and immunity.
codedokode
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.
mchanson
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.
breppp
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.
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amarcheschi
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)
aleph_minus_one
> KF/SaSu/SF
SaSu: Sanctioned Suicide [1]
But I don't know what KF and SF are supposed to stand for.
HeckFeck
> I assume law enforcement just sets up a website with said CSAM
Sentences like this make me sincerely believe that not everyone has a soul.
hsbauauvhabzb
Cocaine is a hell of a drug
mattmaroon
I doubt they’d have to. If the site truly doesn’t remove CSAM 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.
attila-lendvai
they removed it promptly.
remember: god kills a kitten every time you comment/assume something without reading it...
Wowfunhappy
> 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".
dude187
It's the same technique that people on Reddit use to take down subreddits that don't agree with the carefully curated "hive mind".
iamnothere
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.
j-bos
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.
cornholio
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.
jordanb
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.
iamnothere
This is probably the realm of intelligence agencies, who have less accountability and many reasons to eliminate public archives (primarily perception management).
justin66
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.
atomicfiredoll
I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.
hirako2000
Yes kudo. The pressure could simply be inferred as due to the arrogant trend one can observe, the editing of history.
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Havoc
The amount of forces seemingly actively trying to kill the internet of old is disconcerting.
Chat control, DNS as arbiter of whats allowed, walled gardens etc.
andy99
Don’t forget cloudflare
M0r13n
A few weeks ago I noticed DNS4EU couldn’t resolve archive.is and assumed it was just a configuration mistake. I emailed them about it, and after a couple of days or weeks (not really sure) the domain started resolving again. Given AdGuard’s recent report about suspicious pressure on DNS providers to block Archive.today, I’m starting to wonder if DNS4EU’s temporary block was actually related to the same campaign
marcosscriven
The wording in that follow-up email is so emotive it reads more like a Tweet than formal contact from a federal organisation.
That in itself is quite shocking really.
BoppreH
So they're pressuring a DNS resolver to block a specific website? That seems like an incredibly slippery slope.
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?
rs186
I still can't wrap my head around why a DNS provider is required to block websites, especially one that is not associated with ISP or used as default on any device. Oversimplifying this, it's a glorified hash map, so whoever wants to take down the illegal content should just deal with the website owner?
JKCalhoun
Presumably they have failed to do the latter and are just reaching at this point.
master_crab
This just shows that LCEN, DMCA, etc are poorly crafted laws. They ineffectually stop the abuse they claim to end (like copyright infringement). But it does allow large organizations a cudgel to protect their own IP.
nkrisc
I think they’re well crafted laws because I think that’s their intended purpose.
trollbridge
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
attila-lendvai
...or their goal is simply not what they advertise.
orbital-decay
The FBI investigation might be a coincidence. Unsurprisingly, archive.today is attacked with CSAM uploads+reports all the time, you can find occasional mentions of this in their blog from 3 and 9 years ago, and I bet there was a ton of this in between.
xbmcuser
I speculate, and the conspiracy theorist in me believes, something of a compromising nature has been archived and they want that data inaccessible, but at the same time, pointing out what they want hidden would shine a light on it.
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.
lsihgsligh99
If we're speculating, there is another reason to censor archiving site - if you recently committed well documented genocide and want the evidence erased. Given the systematic removal of such content from social media, it would not be surprising if this was related.
codedokode
I used the site several times to archive some page or send it to someone who cannot access the site directly. I never archived anything illegal and never stumbled upon illegal things there. So I don't know why they want to arrest the owner.
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...
stef25
France possibly found a way to pressure Durov into cooperating. Preempting similar actions by Russia. Classic intelligence methods to get someone to come over to the other side.
Perhaps the DGSE also got to plug a cable in to the Telegram infrastructure, which would be huge plus for them and the west in general not in the least because of the war. You could say France has pwnd Durov.
If I'm not mistaken some significant arrest was made shortly after they captured Durov, in the case of this child exploitation stuff.
pards
>> But because it can also be used to bypass paywalls
> How? Does the site pay for subscription for every newspaper?
Someone with a subscription logs into the site, then archives it. Archive.is uses the current user's session and can therefore see the paywalled content.
codedokode
Do they have such an option? I don't see it on the site, and the browser extension seems to send only the URL [1] to the server. Can you provide more information?
[1] https://github.com/JNavas2/Archive-Page/blob/main/Firefox/ba...
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.