Protecting the identity of members make sense. If that org is fighting bad actors engaged in CSAM and child abuse, they’d want to shield themselves from harrasment and retaliation.
What’s most shady is the tactic, asking third party to block archive.is when they apparently didn’t ask achive.is themselves to remove the content.
The org in question, website linked to in the article, published a response/“rebuttal” press release.
I shared my assessment and conclusions from reading it in this comment.
The AdGuard post is certainly much more convincing than their “rebuttal” with logical errors and misrepresentations.
Their response seems to be arguing against a claim that AdGuard didn’t even make. AdGuard acknowledged the existence of CSAM and reported it to archive.today. What they brought into question was whether WAAD was a legitimate organization as opposed to something shady.
In their article, AdGuard published the registration address and the email of WAAD, as well as the names of the directors, and distributed confidential emails while openly defaming our actions, our structure, and the bailiff.
Publishing the public details of an organization, like its director and the email address, are not doxxing. Emails cannot be made confidential without an agreement on both sides, and French law, even if it does protect communications between French people, cannot extend beyond France.
Defamation also is a very strong claim to make here. I can’t speak for European law, nor am I a lawyer of course, but in the US, defamation usually needs to not only be harmful, but knowingly false. AdGuard doesn’t know who you are, nor have they made any false statements. The law they quoted also says “with an intent to harm” which is clearly not the case here, though they have shown reason to assume you have intent to harm archive.today.
AdGuard publicly declared that all reported URLs had been removed. Our technical checks show that part of this content is still accessible on Archive.today and its mirrors.
The fuck is a “technical check”? Maybe clear your cache? I don’t want to know what these URLs are, but I can guarantee they don’t start with
https://adguard-dns.io/.
Suuuuuuuuuuure. It’s all about protecting the kids. Ever notice how shadowy organizations are sometimes about the kids, but never protecting them?
I have to say, the initial reports puzzled me. This begins to make more sense, that someone who doesn’t like site mirroring has been attempting to get the site taken offline.
My guess is that it’s not about CSAM (that was used as the leverage) and it’s probably not about paywalls either.
Most likely, someone wanted to get some unflattering but true information about them removed from the Internet without drawing any attention to it with a RTBF request.
