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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @01:13AM
I see you want to ignore the abundant evidence against this pedophile because you are also a pedophile.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @01:22AM
Children are easy to rape because they're small and weak and can't run fast on those little legs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zeigerpuppy on Monday January 09 2017, @02:19AM
A NIT is essentially malware that gets installed on a target's computer.
If you can install a NIT, it's trivial to plant incriminating material too.
I'm not saying he's innocent but there's a pretty good argument from his defence that the images may have been tampered.
The problem with using intrusion techniques is that the evidence itself may well be tainted.
But of course, law enforcement would never stoop so low as to plant evidence, and police actions are never politically motivated.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday January 09 2017, @05:10AM
If you can install a NIT, it's trivial to plant incriminating material too.
Probably one can claim that as soon as the NIT got loaded, the accused lost control over his PC and cannot be held responsible for the content. Even if the NIT code has no obvious downloader, it may create a hole for another tool that does the download and sets the access date/time.
If this defense is successful, then the TLAs will be less enthusiastic about planting bugs onto people's computers because they cannot be used in court.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @08:39PM
If this defense is successful, then the TLAs will be less enthusiastic about planting bugs onto people's computers because they cannot be used in court.
Not in the slightest. The TLAs will be more enthusiastic than ever about using them. They'll just be ever so much more careful in assuring a parallel construction such that there is never a chance that the penetrations will come forward in court nor offered in disclosure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @04:16PM
If catching a pedo is that important - which it is - then why not do your fucking job and do it properly, follow all procedures and check all requirement boxes the right way; that way, your evidence will be admissible in court.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Monday January 09 2017, @09:25PM
If catching a pedo is that important - which it is
It really isn't. Merely being a pedophile (i.e. someone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children) isn't actually illegal, and even if someone has child porn of some sort, the mere act of possessing it does not actually inflict harm upon anyone. There's no guarantee it was paid for, either. It's a waste of time going after these people. Resources are limited, so they should focus on going after the ones who actually create the child porn in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:05AM