Enlarge (credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images News) Rather than disclose the source code that the FBI used to target a child porn suspect, federal prosecutors in Tacoma, Washington recently dropped their appeal in United States v. Michaud . The case is just one of 135 federal prosecutions nationwide involving the Tor-hidden child porn website Playpen. The vast effort to bust Playpen has raised significant questions about the ethics, oversight, capabilities, and limitations of the government’s ability to hack criminal suspects. In United States v. Michaud , Jay Michaud of Vancouver, Washington allegedly logged on to Playpen in 2015. But unbeknownst to him at that point, federal investigators were temporarily operating the site for 13 days before shutting it down. As authorities controlled Playpen, the FBI deployed a sneaky piece of software (a “network investigative technique (NIT),” dubbed by many security experts as malware), which allowed them to reveal Playpen users’ true IP addresses. With that information in hand, identifying those suspects became trivial. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Feds may let Playpen child porn suspect go to keep concealing their source code
