Via Breitbart Tech
A particularly squeamish battle in the ongoing struggle between privacy and security comes from Washington State, where U.S. District Judge Robert J. Bryan has thrown out evidence in a child pornography case because the FBI will not divulge the hacking techniques it employed to obtain the evidence.The defendant, Jay Michaud, visited a kiddie-porn site on the “Dark Web,” the shadowy wasteland of unregistered websites that can only be visited if precise Internet address information is known. The FBI had effectively taken control of this website — known as “Playpen” — and kept it running for two weeks as a trap, infecting computers that visited the site with malware so their users could be identified.
If the name of the website didn’t already make you queasy, the FBI sting was reportedlycode-named “Operation Pacifier.” We know this because someone at the Bureau evidently screwed up and left operational material online, where it could be discovered by tech journalists.
Playpen was a major child pornography operation, with some 400,000 clients around the world. In fact, one criticism of the operation was that the Bureau exceeded its authority by spying on foreign visitors to the site.
Attorneys for Michaud and others caught up in the sting also argued that the FBI went too far by effectively running a child pornography site for two weeks.
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