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The FBI is not eager to reveal (more) details about methods it used to identify Tor users as part of a child pornography case. FBI's Operation Torpedo previously unmasked Tor users by serving them malicious scripts from secretly seized .onion sites.
The FBI is resisting calls to reveal how it identified people who used a child pornography site on the Tor anonymising network. The agency was ordered to share details by a Judge presiding over a case involving one alleged user of the site. Defence lawyers said they need the information to see if the FBI exceeded its authority when indentifying users. But the Department of Justice (DoJ), acting for the FBI, said the details were irrelevant to the case. "Knowing how someone unlocked the front door provides no information about what that person did after entering the house," wrote FBI agent Daniel Alfin in court papers filed by the DoJ which were excerpted on the Vice news site.
The Judge ordered the FBI to hand over details during a court hearing in late February. The court case revolves around a "sting" the FBI carried out in early 2015 when it seized a Tor-based site called Playpen that traded in images and videos of child sexual abuse. The agency kept the site going for 13 days and used it to grab information about visitors who took part in discussion threads about images of child abuse.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday April 01 2016, @02:58AM
I have often wondered if some authority can "crack" an encrypted disk with their own custom "one-time-pad" so that the communication, when "decoded", will say anything they want it to say.
( You know about the one-time-pad... you XOR your cleartext against a long file of random characters of the one-time-pad.... unless it is decoded by XOR against the identical file of random characters, it won't XOR out correctly... but in this case they simply encrypt any incriminating text they want to, using the nailee's encrypted file as the one-time-pad file. When they run it again in the courtroom, the output is, naturally, the incriminating text - that had nothing in common with the nailee's file but file length. )
Probably make for good courtroom theater, especially if presented by the suit-and-tie types who are really good at projecting credibility when none exists.
By only revealing the cleartext they arrived at, without revealing how they arrived at it, they have carte blanche to pull off anything against anyone.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday April 01 2016, @01:10PM
Doing so would be easy. At one time I might have discounted the possibility of it, but sadly these days I wouldn't put it past them.