El mar, 28-09-2021 a las 11:56 -0700, Jeremy Malcolm escribió:
Dear all,

I am new to this list, although I am not completely new to the Internet 
technical community, as I am a long-time IGF (and occasionally ICANN) 
participant.

I am writing about a case that has been referred to my organization involving 
global blocking (packet dropping, apparently) of IP addresses that have been 
reported as hosting CSAM by the Canadian Center for Child Protection (C3P). 
According to public information, the C3P runs a web crawler called Project 
Arachnid which searches for instances of CSAM on the clearweb, and sends 
automated takedown notices to providers.

However, in the case that was reported to me, rather than allowing the hosting 
provider to take down the offending image, the takedown notice was followed by 
global packet dropping of the hosting IP address, which took down the entire 
server and other websites along with it: the hosting provider has attributed 
this censorship to RIPE, although I cannot verify whether or not this is true. 
If I am able to obtain more details from RIPE staff, I will follow up with them.

Moreover the website in question was not a CSAM website, and neither was the 
image reported by the C3P a CSAM image. It was a scan of a 1960s postcard of an 
indigenous family, sent through the mail, which was included in a detailed 
ethnographic blog article about indigenous women and girls. In other words, 
this is an obvious false positive, and it should never have been reported as 
CSAM at all.

I'm writing to find out if anyone has more information that they can share 
about how this might have happened, and how it can be prevented from happening 
in the future. Many thanks in advance for any help that you can offer. Not sure 
if I should include the RIPE Cooperation ML on this, given that it relates to 
the actions of the C3P?

Hello Jeremy

RIPE did not block your site. What I can see happening is that when C3P found 
some "CSAM content" on your site, it looked up on the _RIPE database_ who was 
the appropriate contact to notify about this, and then either
a) Notified both you and $someone_else
or
b) Notified just $someone_else (which would have then forwarded it to you)

with $someone_else most likely being your hosting provider.
Note that if you don't know to have your details in the whois database, then 
most likely they are not there, and the details will be to your hosting 
provider.

Using the RIPE database to find out the owner of an IP address and the abuse 
contact for it is precisely the right thing to do here (assuming this is 
network range was allocated by RIPE).

Finally, $someone_else filtered your site first (shutdown the machine, 
firewalled it…) and then asked questions. It may be harsh, but it's an 
understandable policy. Specially since they may not be allowed to identify what 
is CSAM and what isn't, and should they misclassify it as not being CSAM, while 
legally fitting into that category, could lead to Real Trouble.™

It is also possible that the filtering was done by a different entity, like the 
upstream provider of your hosting, but I would bet it was done by the hosting 
itself. And it is the filtering entity you should request to remove such 
filtering. You may be able to use different traceroutes to pinpoint the place 
where your server is being blackholed.


Best regards


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