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FBI Dismisses Child Porn Case Rather Than Reveal Their Tor Browser Exploit (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Federal prosecutors just dropped charges against a child pornography suspect rather than reveal the source code for their Tor exploit. Of the 200 cases they're prosecuting nationwide, this is only the second one where the FBI has asked that the case be dismissed. "Disclosure is not currently an option," federal prosecutors wrote in a court ruling Friday. The Department of Justice is still prosecuting 135 different people believed to have accessed an illegal child pornography web site. Before shutting it down, the FBI seized the site and operated it themselves for 13 more days, which allowed them to deploy malware to expose the users' real IP addresses.
Or letting one more child be raped and murder equals what the fuck exactly? Those child porn rings require content and every time a content producer is exposed, an arrest and rescue should immediately occur, 'IMMEDIATELY', fuck future prosecutions.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
First I heard it was a month.
But anyways, they got zero producers.
Distributed over a million images, which means they revictimized children over a million times. This is their own logic on sharing these images btw.
None of this is effective. None of this is okay. Get the producers FFS or keep the op going until you do.
This doesn't feel right at all.
I posit that it's unethical and treasonous to not disclose the vulnerabilities because those exact same vulnerabilities can be used against our own citizens and government agencies by foreign agents. Imagine if foreign hackers brought down the banking industry causing massive economic devastation using an exploit that the FBI knew about but didn't tell the banks?
If you look at it rationally, you will see it's the best approach for getting the highest quantity of jailings versus the highest quality of cases. That seems like the most likely justification. This doesn't address whether they are doing more or less harm than good by withholding the information but I think their view should be obvious.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
using an exploit that the FBI knew about but didn't tell the banks?
How many banks rely on Tor?
Simply dropping the charges is not enough. The only exception for not divulging method to the courts is National Security. The accused, even if charges dropped, should be able to pursue disclosure of methods. The government should not be able to pick and choose after filing charges unless a valid national security claim.
Or rather locking people up trumps protecting children. That is also why they kept running the site for 13 days. By the very definition of the DoJ, they committed child abuse for 13 days. Seems to me the FBI is part of the problem now.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There is actually some genuine "murder porn" out there: You get to see it on the news, perfectly legally. Think for example, the footage exposed by Manning. It even comes with mocking comments by the murderers while they kill innocent civilians.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Considering that the argument for why distributing and owning (as opposed to producing) child porn is that the images actively harm children, I do not think there is any way to justify the FBI's behavior. I think its been generally established that law enforcement cannot commit felonies in order to gather evidence. Otherwise we could have police informants carrying out gang hits in order to capture higher level crime bosses. This is not the start of a slippery slope, it is well down the slope.
They can't have it both ways. If the images don't do actual harm to children, the people who posses the images are only guilty of a minor crime. If the images do harm children, then the FBI should destroy them as soon as they are discovered to prevent continuing harm .
On the central topic there need to be clear rules about what capabilities we want law enforcement to have. It is probably technologically possible for law enforcement to scan all of the records of the great majority of citizens to look for criminal activity. Is that what we want?
Personally I would vote to reduce surveillance and accept a higher rate of criminal activity.
This guy was charged with accessing and possession, not creation. If he had been a content creator then prosecution would not have been stopped.
Lets put this a different way. Would you grant pardon to a person who viewed child porn if it meant you could catch someone who made it? It's the same as offering deals to a street drug dealer to catch their supplier.
Good catch! You're right. It instead has NoScript installed, but not even configured properly.
I'm frankly surprised anyone there would even argue to leave it on. Better to have a web site break than have a malicious site track you when the purpose of using it is to NOT be tracked.
It's funny how often child porn is used as a justification for more spying.
But when actually dealing with child porn goes against more spying, well, fuck children, literally.
Bank infrastructure is typically less secure than Tor.
Bullshit. I have worked for three banks and they all had the best IT security money can buy. One of my current clients has a core switch that's worth more than your house, it's crammed with IDS and IPS modules and whatnot.
Meanwhile Tor has been the source of many incidents, especially once people started putting up fake nodes.
lucm, indeed.
That argument cannot hold water. The "big" law-enforcement actions against downloaders in Europe in the last few years have yielded no or nearly no children to be freed of their abusers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Treason" has a very clear definition under US law, and you apparently do not know or perhaps even do not care what this definition is. My guess is that this is because it's a word you like to use purely for effect, rather than for actual communication.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Treason is the actual charge with which the FBI intended to charge Hillary Clinton.
The FBI never intended to charge Hillary Clinton with treason. If they had, they would have recommended exactly that. They didn't even intend to charge her with mishandling classified information. If they had, they would have done so as well. The only thing that happened was that in deciding that she had done nothing worth an indictment over, Director Comey decided to violate protocol and offer critiques about her email practices. Presumably because he was Ken Starr's right hand man all during the 1990s, trying to pin something - anything - on the Clintons. And failed. Because they hadn't done anything illegal then, either. (With the exception of Bill lying under oath about an affair in a nuisance lawsuit.)
And anyone here defending it. Most of the arguments against the FBI that I see here follow the logic that "if FBI does X to stop a crime, FBI or some other person might do X for bad reason". So no one can own a software exploit, a gun, or a computer, or a sandwich, if it sets a 'precedent' that someone else could posses such an exploit, gun, computer, etc. Seems to me FBI is making a judgement call, how much they can damage the child porn industry through the prosecution and disclosure of method, and how much they can damage it by having people know they aren't immunized by Tor. See header. I'm for giving the FBI that discretion, and if and when it's power is abused, object to THAT, rather than to FBI doing their job correctly.
Gently reply