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The Dark Web is having a rough time right now... although the victims in this case won't earn too much sympathy. An Anonymous-linked hacker speaking to Motherboard brought down about a fifth of the Tor network's 'secret' websites (over 10,000 of them) in a claimed vigilante move. The intruder decided to attack a Dark Web hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, after discovering that it was managing child porn sites it had to be aware of -- they were using gigabytes of data each when the host officially allows no more than 256MB. Each site had its usual pages replaced with a message that not only chastised FH2, but offered a data dump (minus user info) and explained the nature of the hack.
Reportedly, the attack wasn't difficult. The hacker only needed to have control over a site (new or existing) to get started. After that, it was mostly a matter of modifying a configuration file, triggering a password reset and getting root access.
From early indications, the perpetrator is handling the data relatively responsibly. It's going to a security researcher who'll hand it over to law enforcement, which might just use it to bust the porn peddlers.
Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/05/hack-knocks-out-fifth-of-dark-web/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @06:50PM
They're still acting as an agent of the government (even if they only do it once), whether official or not. Courts may accept this, but they are wrong in doing so.
So to be clear, from a moral perspective, you are holding the government responsible for the actions which they did not ask for and did not expect?
If a food bank was giving out soup to the hungry, and it turns out that one of the donators had (unbeknownst to the food bank) stolen the cans of food from a supermarket, would you hold the food bank responsible? Would you hold the hungry people responsible?
You need to distinguish between what the 4th amendment actually protects and what judges say it protects; they are different things.
You are correct, but have it exactly backwards. What the 4th amendment actually protects is what society (and by proxy, the courts... and by further proxy, the police) accepts it as protecting.
What you are describing is what it theoretically or nominally protects, and only what a non-legal-expert interprets it as protecting. That is laudable, and maybe "better" in an abstract sense based on numerous moral frameworks, but none of that matters when a person is facing time in jail. Even if Socrates was correct in the philosophical world, in the physical world he still drank the hemlock.