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Judge Orders FBI to Reveal Whether White House Launched 'Tor Pedo' Torpedo Exploits

posted by janrinok on Thursday October 27 2016, @03:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the hacking-is-legal dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

A US judge overseeing an FBI "Playpen case" has told agents to reveal whether or not their investigative hacking was approved by the White House.

The case is one of several the Feds are pursuing against more than 100 alleged users of the child sex abuse material exchange network called the Playpen. The prosecutions have become test grounds over investigators' use of hacking tools to unmask Tor users – Playpen was hidden in the Tor network and agents injected tracking software into Playpen visitors' browsers to identify users.

In June, a judge hearing one of the Playpen cases in Virginia ruled that the FBI can hack any computer in any country, if it wants.

During its investigation, the FBI compromised Playpen's Tor-protected distribution servers, leaving them in operation to keep users visiting the service. The Feds then hacked the targets' computers to identify the owners.

It's not a crime if the President orders it.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:09PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:09PM (#419386) Journal

    The judge is talking crap and if nobody in the US can see the down side to his proclamation then they are in for an interesting time ahead.

    We can see the downside, janrinok, but we have no remedy left until the guillotines are dusted off and put into service again. Nobody in government, from the humble hamlet to the leviathan in the Maryland/Virginia swamp, gives one whit for the rule of law anymore. The NSA doesn't. The FBI doesn't. The DEA doesn't. The IRS doesn't. Congress doesn't. The Whitehouse doesn't. Criminals have completed their coup over democracy and are about to annoint one of their own as a symbol of their final victory, after having rubbed our noses in their diffidence toward our collective naivete. On the local side, cops summarily execute citizens without ever being charged with murder, because they are enabled by prosecutors and a judiciary whose stock-in-trade is bullying and punishing; no amount of data about the rate of false convictions or parallel construction deters them or invites politicians, the ones who are supposedly accountable to somebody, to do anything about it.

    Everything here is broken. The only thing left is for gravity to pull the pieces asunder.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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