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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: 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