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from the purveying-porn-for-profit-and-prosecution dept.
As Ars has reported, federal investigators temporarily seized a Tor-hidden site known as Playpen in 2015 and operated it for 13 days before shutting it down. The agency then used a "network investigative technique" (NIT) as a way to ensnare site users.
However, according to newly unsealed documents recently obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI not only temporarily took over one Tor-hidden child pornography website in order to investigate it, the organization was in fact authorized to run a total of 23 other such websites.
Security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told Ars that "it's a pretty reasonable assumption" that at one point the FBI was running roughly half of the known child porn sites hosted on Tor-hidden servers. Lewis runs OnionScan, an ongoing bot-driven analysis of the Tor-hidden darknet. Her research began in April 2016, and it shows that as of August 2016, there were 29 unique child porn related sites on Tor-hidden servers.
"Doing the math, it's not zero sites, it's probably not all the sites, but we know that they're getting authorization for some of them," she said. "I think it's a reasonable assumption—I don't think the FBI would be doing their job if they weren't."
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday November 13 2016, @03:17PM
It is produced by the government? Not just distributed? I doubt that.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Sunday November 13 2016, @04:02PM
You've never met our government.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @05:11PM
You've never met our government.
Sure I have ... back when I was a kid ... hey, wait a second ...
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Sunday November 13 2016, @05:24PM
Without evidence to the contrary or supporting it, I imagine the law's definition of producing is the same today for making a digital copy and serving it to a client as it was decades ago for photocopying a picture and handing it to someone. By that definition viewing could be construed as producing as your browser makes a copy of the digital stream to show on your computer rather than just watching the bytes go by. You'd definitely be producing if you saved a copy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @09:19AM
Do you think the NSA surveillance system skips camera-phones and webcam-equipped computers? Or the phones and computers owned by children and located in their bedrooms?