In a First, Judge Throws Out Evidence Obtained from FBI Malware (vice.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on Motherboard: For the first time, a judge has thrown out evidence obtained via a piece of FBI malware. The move comes from a cased affected by the FBI's seizure of a dark web child pornography site in February 2015, and the subsequent deployment of a network investigative technique (NIT) -- the agency's term for a hacking tool -- in order to identify the site's visitors. "Based on the foregoing analysis, the Court concludes that the NIT warrant was issued without jurisdiction and thus was void ab initio," Judge William G. Young of the District of Massachusetts writes in an order. "It follows that the resulting search was conducted as though there were no warrant at all. Since warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable, and the good-faith exception is inapplicable, the evidence must be excluded," it continues. Young's order came in response to a motion to suppress from the lawyers of Alex Levin, who was arrested as part of the investigation into the child pornography site Playpen. After seizing the site, the FBI ran Playpen from a government facility from February 20 to March 4, 2015, and used a NIT to obtain over a thousand IP addresses for US-based users of the site, and at least 3000 for users abroad, according to Motherboard's investigations.

Comments

Re:Mixed Feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

The theory is that fapping to child porn makes you more likely to molest children.

Bullshit. One theory is that demand for child porn drives creation of child porn. Another theory is that the child porn is created without (by definition) the legal consent of the child and is an abuse of the child's privacy. Another theory is that the production of the child porn is, in its self part of the abuse by the abuser and so you are complicit in the child abuse when you use the child porn. Not one of these is "the theory". The mostly seem to me to contain an element of truth, even the unlikely case it were shown that child porn never drives or makes worse child abuse.

Re:Mixed Feelings

[TheCarp]

Not only that but, there was a great article about how the whole issue was a lot more black and white when the laws were made; back when cameras were so expensive few people owned really decent ones and could print copy to distribute.

Back then, pretty much ALL child porn was, indeed, exactly the evil stuff we think of... adults raping children for financial profit. Certainly, there is no denying that this still happens..... but it is no longer the whole story.

Now, we even have 15 year olds being threatened with child porn because their same age girlfiend shared some nude pix.

Hell, we don't even have to come all the way to modern day to see abuses. Who remembers child sex performer Tracy Lords, who lied about her age, hit 18, did one more movie, then revealed her age; causing all previous movies to be exposed as child porn and illegal to posess, making the new one the only legal one on the market. Yah.... that was exactly what the law was intended to "protect".