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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, 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.