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Australian Authorities Hacked Computers in the US (vice.com)
Motherboard is reporting that Australian authorities hacked Tor users in the United States as part of a child pornography investigation. The revelation comes through recently-filed US court documents. The incident underscores a trend where law enforcement around the world are increasingly pursuing targets overseas using hacking tools, raising legal questions around agencies' reach. From the report: In one case, Australian authorities remotely hacked a computer in Michigan to obtain the suspect's IP address. "The Love Zone" was a prolific dark web child abuse site, where users were instructed to upload material at least once a month to maintain access to the forum. By July 2014, the site had over 29,000 members, according to US court documents, constituting what the US Department of Justice described as a "technologically sophisticated conspiracy." In 2014, Queensland Police Service's Task Force Argos, a small, specialised unit focused on combating child exploitation crimes, identified the site's Australian administrator in part because of a localized greeting he signed messages with. The unit quietly took over his account, and for months ran the site in an undercover capacity, posing as its owner. Task Force Argos' logo includes a scorpion, and the tagline "Leave No Stone Unturned." Because The Love Zone was based on the dark web, users typically connected via the Tor network, masking their IP addresses even from the law enforcement agents who were secretly in control of the site. Task Force Argos could see what the users were viewing, and what pages they were visiting, but not where they were really connecting from.
No, fire your lawyer. Compiling with GCC is explicitly called out as not making your code GPL.
I don't know about you, but I do have a problem with feds running a kiddy porn site for a few months. There are limits to what law enforcement should be doing, and using kids as bait is one of the things where you don't just step over the lines but actually throw up on it. Especially when so little is accomplished by doing it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
raising legal questions around agencies' reach.
Queensland Police Service's Task Force Argos, a small, specialised unit focused on combating child exploitation crimes, identified the site's Australian administrator in part because of a localized greeting he signed messages with.
In other words, an Australian law enforcement agency was going after an Australian running a child porn site. Yeah, that is totally out of bounds for them. Who would ever think a country would have jurisdiction over people committing crimes in their country.
Child pornography has no borders. Based on the hyperbole from Motherboard we can presume they support child pornographers to be protected so they can continue raping one and two-year olds because that's what's most important.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I wouldn't be surprised if a large number of them were different "law enforcing agents" from different countries :D
I have to agree with you. From the quick google search I did possession and distribution of CP is prima facie illegal in the US. There are no special exceptions for LEOs conducting strings. Obviously we have a big general exception for storage of evidence etc, maybe it was the Aussies that did most of the objectionable hosting etc but its still highly questionable for the DOJ to cooperate in an investigation using such methods. If that is "ok to do" than pretty much all the DOJ need do is find some banana republic somewhere to hire some work out to and basically anything they do on the Internet is suddenly above and beyond the reach of law.
The other issue is hacking suspects computers without a search warrant seems like a plain violation of the CFAA to me. So again the feds cooperating with an other nation using such methods should be illegal as they are accessories to the crime.
If Law Enforcement can't follow the law the rest of us should not have to either.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Maybe more than actual users.
Remember, the internet is where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.
Assuming there are 7.4 Billion people and 40% of them have internet access, then the proportion on that site is 29,000/2960000000 = 9.79e-6. So that is a little less than 1 in 100,000 people.
Don't forget, this is only the number of people who were savvy enough to find a dark-web site and maintain an account with monthly submissions, so you're probably off by an order of magnitude.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Maybe more than actual users.
Remember, the internet is where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.
Women are bots, and the bots are traps. Ashley Madison Used Chatbots to Lure Cheaters, Then Threatened to Expose Them When They Complained
Did the Queensland Police hack any computers? They appear to have simply sent emails containing links. When the link was clicked, the IP address of the mail client as recorded.
From the TLA:
>> Details on how exactly this was achieved are limited, but according to a court document from another case,
>> “When a user clicked on that hyperlink, the user was advised that the user was attempting to open a video
>> file from an external website. If the user chose to open the file, a video file containing images of child pornography
>> began to play, and the FLA [foreign law enforcement agency] captured and recorded the IP address of the user accessing the file.”
So it doesn't appear that any code was inserted into the target computer. The offenders didn't follow good opsec - they clicked on a link while they were not connected to a TOR proxy.
As for jurisdiction - it appears that the server was moved to Brisbane. Again from the TLA:
>> At one point, The Love Zone server was also reportedly moved to Brisbane, giving Task Force Argos,
>> the Queensland Police Service unit that took over the site, access to every private message on the site.
If the server was located in Queensland, then Queensland court orders could legitimately apply to it. So no evidence of hacking or of extra-territoriality. Move along folks, no misconduct, just good police work.
Anyone in Australia hacking anything in the US should result in criminal charges (not that it'd ever go to trial unless the perpetrator actually found his or her way to US soil). Period. It doesn't matter if the person doing the hacking is a private citizen or the prime minister.
That said, the "hacking" they're talking about seems to have been giving the guy a link a hyperlink. Calling giving someone a hyperlink and them clicking it a "hack" is a stretch, imo, if that hyperlink doesn't do anything other than connect to a web site. If it downloaded malware or something similar, then ok, but it doesn't sound like that's what happened.
Why should it be illegal if they are law enforcement? We don't go after the thousands of hacks that occur on a daily basis yet you want to single out police by doing it for a good cause?