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WASHINGTON — For nearly ii weeks final year, the FBI operated what it described as i of the Internet's largest child pornography websites, allowing users to download thousands of illicit images and videos from a government site in the Washington suburbs.

The operation — whose details remain largely clandestine — was at least the third time in recent years that FBI agents took control of a child pornography site merely left it online in an attempt to catch users who officials said would otherwise remain hidden behind an encrypted and anonymous calculator network. In each case, the FBI infected the sites with software that punctured that security, allowing agents to place hundreds of users.

The Justice Department best-selling in court filings that the FBI operated the site, known as Playpen, from February. 20 to March 4, 2015. At the fourth dimension, the site had more 215,000 registered users and included links to more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including more than than 9,000 files that users could download directly from the FBI. Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten.

That approach is a meaning departure from the government'southward past tactics for contesting online kid porn, in which agents were instructed that they should not allow images of children beingness sexually assaulted to become public. The Justice Department has said that children depicted in such images are harmed each time they are viewed, and once those images leave the government's command, agents have no way to prevent them from beingness copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet.

Officials best-selling those risks, but said they had no other way to identify the people accessing the sites.

"We had a window of opportunity to become into i of the darkest places on Earth, and non a lot of other options except to non do information technology," said Ron Hosko, a former senior FBI official who was involved in planning one of the agency's first efforts to have over a child porn site. "At that place was no other way we could identify every bit many players."

Lawyers for kid pornography victims expressed surprise that the FBI would agree to such tactics – in office because agents had rejected them in the past – but nonetheless said they approved. "These are places where people know exactly what they're getting when they go far," said James Marsh, who represents some of the children depicted in some of the most widely-circulated images. "It's not similar they're blasting it out to the world."

The FBI hacks have drawn repeated – though then far unsuccessful – legal challenges, largely centered on the search warrants agents obtained earlier agents cracked the computer network.

But they accept also prompted a backfire of a different kind. In a courtroom filing, a lawyer for one of the men arrested after the FBI sting charged that "what the regime did in this case is comparable to flooding a neighborhood with heroin in the hope of snatching an array of low-level drug users." The defence force lawyer, Colin Fieman, asked a federal gauge to throw out child pornography charges against his client, old middle school teacher Jay Michaud. A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments on that request Fri.

Federal agents first noticed Playpen non long afterwards it went online in August, 2014. The site was buried in what is frequently called the "nighttime web," a part of the internet that is accessible to the public only through Tor, network software that bounces users' internet traffic from one computer to some other to go far largely untraceable.

By March of last twelvemonth, the FBI said, Playpen had grown to become "the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the globe," the Justice Section said in a court filing. FBI agents tracked the site to estimator servers in North Carolina, and in Feb seized the site and quietly moved information technology to its own facility in Newington, Va.

The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days. During that time, federal prosecutors told defense lawyers that the site included more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children. Some of those could be downloaded directly from the authorities's computers; others were available through links to other difficult-to-observe locations on the web, Fieman said.

One department of the site was labeled "toddlers," according to court records. And prosecutors said that some of the images users accessed during the time Playpen was nether the government's control included "prepubescent female" having sexual intercourse with adults.

Fieman said more than than 100,000 Playpen registered users visited the site while it was under the FBI's control. The Justice Department said in court filings that agents had found "true" computer addresses for more than one,300 of them, and has told defence force lawyers that 137 take been charged with a offense, though it has and then far declined to publicly identify those cases.

Law enforcement has long complained that online services like Tor create a type of safety haven for criminals because they hibernate the unique network addresses from which people connect to sites on the cyberspace. Officials said the only way for the government to crack that network was to take over the site and infect information technology with malware that would trick users' web browsers into revealing their real internet addresses, which agents could then trace back to the people who were using them.

"The government always considers seizing an illegal kid pornography site and removing it from being immediately and permanently," Justice Section spokesman Peter Carr said. "While doing then would finish the trafficking of child pornography taking identify on that one website, it would do nothing to prevent those same users from disseminating child pornography through other means."

Withal, he said, "The decision whether to merely close down a website or to permit it to continue operating for a brief catamenia for a law enforcement purpose is a hard one."

Justice officials said they were unable to hash out details of the investigation because much of it remains under seal, at their asking.

The Justice Section said in courtroom filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves. But it did not dispute that the agents immune images that were already on the site to remain in that location, and that information technology did not block the site'south users from uploading new ones while it was under the government's control. And the FBI has non said it had whatever power to prevent users from circulating the material they downloaded onto other sites.

"At some bespeak, the government investigation becomes indistinguishable from the criminal offence, and we should ask whether that'southward OK," said Elizabeth Joh, a University of California Davis law professor who has studied undercover investigations. "What's crazy well-nigh it is who'southward making the cost/benefit analysis on this? Who decides that this is the best method of identifying these people?"

The FBI was get-go known to accept operated a kid porn site in 2012, when agents seized command of three sites from their operator in Nebraska. FBI Special Agent Jeff Tarpinian testified that the government "relocated ii servers to an FBI facility hither in Omaha and we continued to let those child pornography run – websites operate for a short period of time."

That instance led to federal child pornography charges confronting at least 25 people. But in an illustration of how hard the cases can be, at to the lowest degree 9 of the people charged in those cases are all the same identified in court records but as "John Doe," suggesting the FBI has and so far been unable to link specific people to the network addresses it logged.

The next year, the FBI took control of a dark web site known as Liberty Hosting. The man prosecutors take accused of operating that site, Eric Marques, is due to be extradited to the United States; the charges confronting him remain sealed. The FBI revealed its role in an Irish courtroom hearing covered by local media.

In each case, the FBI injected the site with malware to crack Tor's anonymity.

Those hacks, developed with the help of exterior contractors, were a technical milestone. When the FBI starting time realized information technology could break through Tor, Hosko said the agency gathered counterterrorism investigators and intelligence agencies to encounter if any of them had a more pressing demand for the software. "It was this, exponentially," Hosko said.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/21/fbi-ran-website-sharing-thousands-child-porn-images/79108346/

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