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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.
Child abuse, horrible as it is, does not qualify as "National Security". Also, because they did disclose the name of the accused, they should be sued into the ground after dropping the charges. While it is not pretty, civil liberties need to be defended, even if it means defending scumbags. Otherwise they can just destroy anybody in the future by first publicly accusing them and then dropping the charges, possibly without ever providing any evidence or only fake evidence they then withdraw when asked to prove that it is genuine and how they obtained it. Not good at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.