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An FBI Hacking Campaign Targeted Over a Thousand Computers (vice.com)
derekmead writes: In order to fight what it has called one of the largest child pornography sites on the dark web, the FBI hacked over a thousand computers, according to court documents reviewed by Motherboard and interviews with legal parties involved.
Just a month after launch, a bulletin board called Playpen had nearly 60,000 member accounts. By the following year, this number had ballooned to almost 215,000, with over 117,000 total posts, and an average of 11,000 unique visitors each week. Many of those posts, according to FBI testimony, contained some of the most extreme child abuse imagery one could imagine, and others included advice on how sexual abusers could avoid detection online.
But after Playpen was seized, it wasn't immediately closed down, unlike previous dark web sites that have been shuttered by law enforcement. Instead, the FBI ran Playpen from its own servers in Newington, Virginia, from February 20 to March 4, reads a complaint filed against a defendant in Utah. During this time, the FBI deployed what is known as a network investigative technique (NIT), the agency's term for a hacking tool.
Just a month after launch, a bulletin board called Playpen had nearly 60,000 member accounts. By the following year, this number had ballooned to almost 215,000, with over 117,000 total posts, and an average of 11,000 unique visitors each week. Many of those posts, according to FBI testimony, contained some of the most extreme child abuse imagery one could imagine, and others included advice on how sexual abusers could avoid detection online.
But after Playpen was seized, it wasn't immediately closed down, unlike previous dark web sites that have been shuttered by law enforcement. Instead, the FBI ran Playpen from its own servers in Newington, Virginia, from February 20 to March 4, reads a complaint filed against a defendant in Utah. During this time, the FBI deployed what is known as a network investigative technique (NIT), the agency's term for a hacking tool.
They weren't hacking. They were obtaining the IP address of connected machines who were using Tor to access child porn sites. I just call that good investigation. Your IP address isn't private information, just like your postal address isn't.
This is a legitimate use of hacking.
Bit of a slippery slope when Law Enforcement is breaking laws to catch criminals. This is not good policing in my opinion. There should be no excuse for breaking the law, especially in an effort to enforce the law. Law enforcement should never be 'do as I say, not as I do.'
A simple test is.. if a citizen did this to another citizen, would that be against the law? Last I checked, hacking your neighbors computer and collecting information from it is definitely against the law. (Unless you're Microsoft and say you're going to do it in your EULA, bit that's a different can of worms.)
I haven't seen it in the comments yet, but by seizing the site and NOT shutting it down, the government chose to run a child porn server. Does that not then put them under the same legal scrutiny as those they were investigating? Of course I did not read the article and may be missing a bunch of detail, but if the gov was actively serving child porn, then THAT is a crime in my eyes - regardless if it was a honeypot or not.