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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.
In the United States, the federal government has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit; there are exceptions for tort and contract law.
It's a very interesting legal stance if the government says it has sovereign immunity, they claim to have not committed any actions that would invoke the tort exceptions. Therefore, running a child porn website does, according to the government, not do any harm to any potential victims (which is what tort is) and thus dissemination of child porn which is 'illegal because it harms the children', may then fall under first amendment protections just like any other website.
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It is not so clear that this is "good". There is not much evidence for a causal link from porn to sexual crime. Most countries that have liberalized their pornography laws have experienced a decline in sexual violence toward women and children. Child porn is illegal even if is entirely animated, or made with adult actors portraying adolescents. That pushes the entire genre onto the dark web. If, instead, the law only banned the actual abuse of children, rather than thought crime, there could be a legal market that would drive out most of the material involving actual harm to children.