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.

Comments

Not hacking

[110010001000]

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.

Slippery Slope

[duke_cheetah2003]

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.)

They had a warrant...

[gQuigs]

The issue was did this one warrant let the government hack into everyone who tried to use Tor to connect this hidden site. Tor prevented the FBI from determining their IP address without further attacks on individual computers. The other issue is if the Judge knew they were authorizing this many computers to possibly be hacked.

I believe they waited until the user tried to login, create an account, or something like that, so just accidentally browsing to the site shouldn't have triggered the attack.

From the facts I have from this article, I think the FBI did the right thing.

Re:So the gov knowingly ran a child porn site?

[guruevi]

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.