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FBI Runs Half of Known Child Porn Sites on Tor

posted by janrinok on Sunday November 13 2016, @11:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the purveying-porn-for-profit-and-prosecution dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi-operated-23-tor-hidden-child-porn-sites-deployed-malware-from-them/

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."

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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday November 13 2016, @04:04PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Sunday November 13 2016, @04:04PM (#426263) Journal

    Per the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography the majority of the child pornography produced is by the US government.

    Do you mean "produced" in the conventional sense of "made" or "created" rather than "distributed" (as this story is about)? If so I find your statement difficult to believe. Can you offer corroboration for it?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @06:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @06:46PM (#426301)

    "Produced" in the 70s sense would have been printing pictures/films as well as distribution.

    The report, theoretically, is still available, but keep in mind some people were prosecuted at the the time for having a copy (the history of that is interesting and worth reading).