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

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: 4, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Sunday November 13 2016, @08:01PM

    by Zz9zZ (1348) on Sunday November 13 2016, @08:01PM (#426320)

    Our media pumps this shit out all the time. Every TV show with some form of law enforcement ALWAYS crosses the legal line to "save the day". There has been an uptick in torture, illegal search and seizure, and surveillance at least in the US media. The abuses (potential and real) of the criminal justice system are now exploding out of control with the digital universe, and there is a real propaganda force working to make public opinion favorable to such criminal activity.

    Remember folks, something can be illegal right up until the point where a law says its not (and vice versa). Absolute right/wrong don't exist, we determine the limits we hold each other to.

    --
    ~Tilting at windmills~
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