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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: 5, Insightful) by black6host on Monday January 09 2017, @04:08AM
I have a friend whose ex accused him of molesting her children. The local newspaper reported that he had been arrested and confessed. He had made no confession. This was front page news. He was self employed and it hurt his business. A few days later a retraction in the paper was made. In the back, in small print. He was eventually acquitted but the damage had been done. The children admitted that his ex put them up to it.
It's terribly important that we adhere to the innocent until proven guilty system of law that we here in the US enjoy. Sure, a few will get away. More importantly, those who are innocent should be protected. When it comes to children, it doesn't work that way. All someone needs to do is make the accusation. Game over. Sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @05:13PM
Tell that to all the pizzagate loony's. It's a terrible shame when a regular Joe is *supposedly* set up by the FBI. But some incredibly vague emails from a questionable source equals a global conspiracy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @09:28PM
Pizzagate is ridiculous, but the actual source isn't that questionable. It's been practically admitted already on numerous occasions that the emails were real.