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.

Comments

Which is more important?

[Anonymous Coward]

Secrecy or Child Pornography...

We report, you decide.

Re: Which is more important?

[Pseudonym]

Bank infrastructure is typically less secure than Tor.

Re: Which is more important?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll counter, how many CIA agents rely on TOR? "The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997."

Re: Which is more important?

[gweihir]

This is not a "Tor" exploit. It is a Firefox exploit against the version of Firefox used in the Tor browser bundle. It may well still be exploitable in current Firefox versions, including the one used in the current Tor browser bundle versions. Otherwise there really would be no point in keeping it secret.

Hence the FBI is actively and knowingly endangering anybody using Firefox. That seems to be legal, but it is hugely unethical.

So 135 more dismissals in queue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like there is a very simple formula for defense now and forever for any of their tor tapping. Smart, very smart.

Now we know where the moral compass is pointing.

[MrCodswallop]

Interesting, albeit disturbing, insight into the moral compass of the FBI. Secrecy trumps child pornography.

Wrong focus.

[Gravis Zero]

The question is if the FBI is actively seeking the child abusing producers of child pornography or if they are really only interested in catching the people who download it. It's all very distasteful but I'm more interested ending the abuse than throwing every twisted individual in jail for a period of time. I understand that it's a global problem which is why governments should work together to stop the madness.

Re:Wrong focus.

[gweihir]

Well, judging from their tactics in "fighting terrorism", they would produce child pornography themselves, if they legally could. They have been producing "terrorists" for a while now. Hence my take would be they have zero interest in in actually doing anything real about the problem because that could dry up the ready supply of downloaders that they can catch and prosecute easily. And with that supply drying up, their funding and power would get reduced. If that is not a perfectly fine motive explaining what they are doing, then I do not know what is.

Re:Now we know where the moral compass is pointing

[ShanghaiBill]

Or letting one more child be raped and murder equals what the fuck exactly?

There are many myths about "snuff films" that record actual murders, but none have ever been verified. In the most famous case Ruggero Deodato was prosecuted for murder, but was acquitted when the actors and actresses that he had allegedly murdered showed up to testify in his defense. It is hard to imagine how some scenes in his films could have been made without killing someone, but they obviously were, since the people "killed" were still alive and healthy.

Re:What authority is FBI using to NOT disclose?

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Now we know where the moral compass is pointing

[Harlequin80]

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.

To avoid public scrutiny

[Anonymous Coward]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/fbi-would-rather-prosecutors-drop-cases-than-disclose-stingray-details/ April 7, 2015

The FBI actually has a policy to drop cases instead of revealing their detection (spying) methods, to avoid public scrutiny of what they're doing.

The new document, which was released Tuesday by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) in response to its March 2015 victory in a lawsuit filed against the Erie County Sheriff’s Office (ECSO) in Northwestern New York, includes this paragraph: "In order to ensure that such wireless collection equipment/technology continues to be available for use by the law enforcement community, the equipment/technology and any information related to its functions, operation and use shall be protected from potential compromise by precluding disclosure of this information to the public in any manner including but not limited to: press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings."

That has to do with their 'Stingray' technology, but I'm sure it applies to any kind of digital surveillance.

Besides, if they didn't drop the case the court would have probably ruled against them, like what happened in a case that slashdot mentioned last year: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/07/13/0411255/us-judge-throws-out-cell-phone-stingray-evidence-for-the-first-time

It would be interesting to see the tipping point

[mykepredko]

Where is the point where the crime is so egregious that the FBI is willing to publish the exploit? I presume their keeping the exploit secret because once it's known, it will be fixed and they will no longer be able to monitor the "deep, dark, black, web"?

What if there was a terrorist attack and the FBI knew about it and sat on it because they thought the expected value of the property and lives lost was less than the value of the exploit and the intelligence received from it?

Would the FBI (and the US government) be liable for damages because they could have prevented the crime?

Re:It would be interesting to see the tipping poin

[AmiMoJo]

There is another explanation. They might not want to release it because it might not stand up in court. If it gives them the ability to run arbitrary code on the target machine, if they can places files on that machine, the defendant will claim that the FBI planted those images. I'm no expert on US law but it seems like there would be some issue with the evidence being tainted too, and then everything else i s fruit of the poisoned tree.