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In a surprising and worrying move, the FBI has dropped its case against a man accused of downloading child sex abuse images, rather than reveal details about how they caught him.
Jay Michaud, a middle school teacher in Vancouver, Washington, was arrested in July last year after visiting the Playpen, a dark web meeting place tens of thousands of perverts used to swap mountains of vile underage porn.
Unbeknown to him at the time, the FBI were, for about a fortnight, running the site after taking over its servers, and managed to install a network investigative technique (NIT) on his computer to get his real public IP address and MAC address. The Playpen was hidden in the Tor anonymizing network, and the spyware was needed to unmask suspects – about 1,300 public IP addresses were collected by agents during the operation.
According to the prosecution, a police raid on his home revealed a substantial hoard of pictures and video of child sex abuse on computer equipment. But now, guilty or not, he's now off the hook after the FBI filed a motion to dismiss its own case [PDF] late last month.
Why? Because Michaud's lawyer insisted that the FBI hand over a sample of the NIT code so it could be checked to ensure that it didn't breach the terms of the warrant the FBI obtained to install the malware, and to check that it wouldn't throw up any false positives.
US District Judge Robert Bryan agreed, saying that unless the prosecution turned over the code, he'd have to dismiss the charges. The FBI has since been arguing against that, but has now decided that it's better to drop the case than reveal its techniques.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @01:12AM
US District Judge Robert Bryan agreed, saying that unless the prosecution turned over the code, he'd have to dismiss the charges. The FBI has since been arguing against that, but has now decided that it's better to drop the case than reveal its techniques.
Am I reading this correctly then that we should expect much more parallel construction; i.e.: they will/want to keep using this NIT thing and then just set up parallel constructions for how they got it so that they don't have to reveal NIT?
Is that is, FBI (Yeah, I'm talking to you guys... I know there's at least 2 FBI agents reading this site)? Something ... something... defend the constitution against enemies foreign and domestic... You guys should really rethink what you are actually doing all day!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @01:19AM
FBI (Yeah, I'm talking to you guys... I know there's at least 2 FBI agents reading this site)
Wow. That's some paranoia you have there. Please log in so the court of public opinion can lynch you for being insane, and not in the good way like that crazy guy MDC. The bad kind of crazy where you're a terrorist raghead with plans to blow up every linode.
(Score: 3, Funny) by tangomargarine on Monday January 09 2017, @03:49PM
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08, @07:19PM (#451267)
[...]
Wow. That's some paranoia you have there. Please log in
Mmhm.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday January 09 2017, @05:52PM
Really? We're a site frequented by technologically savvy malcontents - seems to me the security agencies would be slacking in their job not to keep at least a casual eye on things here. Plus "Yeah boss, I *am* browsing slashdot at work - see it's on my list of things to monitor..."
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Monday January 09 2017, @08:23PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday January 09 2017, @03:17AM
But don't they already have that? They proved he was a pedo through good old fashioned raiding his personal home computer physically. Maybe I missed something, but it sounds like they are saying that even that is deemed invalid if the reason they suspected him in the first place is because of potentially illegal behavior. It sounds like their is really not all that much they can do, if their method is breaking tor is considered illegal and not ground for a warrant.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by black6host on Monday January 09 2017, @04:14AM
Sure, he may have been a pedo. But the means don't justify the end if you wish to maintain our constitutional rights. Some will get away with it but the goal is to protect the innocent. Use legal means of investigation is you're gong to pursue that. Otherwise, they can fuck off.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @04:24AM
The issue is there was no legal justification to raid his computer in the first place so whatever they get from that is inadmissible. That's the whole point 'parallel construction'. They find out somebody is guilty through unlawful, if not illegal, means and then try to get that same proof in a legal way even if by relying on "anonymous informants", though I imagine there are limits on how far they can go with that.
I'm not really fond of the system mostly because it's starting to feel more and more like we're approaching the old, much maligned, police states of the past - the stasi, KGB, and so on. Going from normalcy to the degrees of privacy violations and unlawful behaviors that these various law enforcement groups would become infamous for is not something that happens overnight. It slowly builds up and we're certainly headed in that direction fast and sure. And our technology has already long since outpaced our ethics and capacity for oversight. Snowden's leaks included mention of the fact that NSA officers with access to information would spy on their significant others or exes, copy 'private' photos of attractive people, and so on. At some point you really just have to slow down, even if it means some undesirables through the net.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @08:35AM
FBI: Your honor, the evidence clearly shows that the accused is guilty.
Judge: Please demonstrate that you did not plant the evidence.
FBI: Err... We withdraw the case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @08:38PM
They proved he was a pedo through good old fashioned raiding his personal home computer physically.
Unfortunately that was after they pwned his computer. They took control of his computer before legally raiding his house. Who knows how much of the content on his computer he is actually responsible for?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Monday January 09 2017, @04:32AM
I wonder who some of these out-of-nowhere editors are, being some have joined with little to no history of comments or submissions. They can see IPs on every post.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by charon on Monday January 09 2017, @07:19AM
Actually we can't. We only see a hash of the IP, which is usually consistent for a particular user. Maybe the site admins can, though I've never asked.
But of course, that's what an FBI agent would say...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @12:55PM
> We only see a hash of the IP
How can someone say stupid shit like this unless they are a complete ignoramus without any clue of computer science, programming, mathematics and basic logic?
There are only 4 billion IP addresses, if you have a HASH of the IP address you HAVE the IP address!!!!
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday January 09 2017, @02:01PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday January 09 2017, @03:45PM
unless they are a complete ignoramus without any clue of computer science, programming, mathematics and basic logic
Somebody needs to review the definition of a hash.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday January 09 2017, @06:34PM
He's saying you could build an IP dictionary by hashing every single IP and doing a comparison against the target hash. You would have to know the has algorithm and salt though.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday January 09 2017, @07:06PM
Wanted to follow up. I poked around the source for a few min and it looks like a plain md5 hash is used. A rainbow table is doable. 16 bytes for IP and 16 bytes for md5 with a total of 4,294,967,296 records is ~137 GB. If someone could find a way show a user hash for a specific comment then i could be motivated to build the rainbow table with a small web front-end for people to use : )
https://github.com/SoylentNews/rehash/blob/e90330293ad9a27e3975a88ea8c17dccec74e130/Slash/Utility/Environment/Environment.pm#L3108 [github.com]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday January 09 2017, @08:23PM
Yup, which is why we haven't bothered changing the hashing algorithm or anything. That small of a key space you don't gain anything by using a better algorithm. Use our .onion site or a VPN if it bugs you too much.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.