dark web The FBI hacked a child porn website on the dark web and nailed 1,500 users

[Holmes]

I dont consider one thousand five hundred users a win and why only that amount they have a one hundred thousand users take the site down for good THESE PEOPLE ARE DISGUSTING AND CANT BE HELPED.  You make me wanty to go find a child porn site just to hack into it and deface it a warning saying shut down or else.

[funkyy]

On 07-01-2016 at 8:40 AM, knowledge said:

good for fbi i think people needed to take down lots of websites like that i hate  people like them  i hope the 1,500 have a very hard time nowdays

 

Well said knowledge!! People have posted differing viewpoints about this, but the most important thing is that these scumbags have been caught and will be taken out of circulation. People here can nit-pick about details and implications and can look for a negative slant in this, but I say a big "well done!!" to the FBI. These are the types of cases on which law enforcement resources should be spent.

[Holmes]

The FBI did a good job at taking them down there going to do a better job if they take care of the rest of those sick sons of b*tches.  I dont agree with how they did it usings NITs I do want all these child porn sites taken down if they cant find a way to do it legally there free to use NITs.  I do find the way they did it interesting they set up there own server's I like that.

[Reefa]

17 hours ago, Holmes said:

I dont consider one thousand five hundred users a win and why only that amount they have a one hundred thousand users take the site down for good THESE PEOPLE ARE DISGUSTING AND CANT BE HELPED.  You make me wanty to go find a child porn site just to hack into it and deface it a warning saying shut down or else.

 

Exactly if i remember correctly Anonymous did a better job a while ago naming and shaming the twisted fucks.. They should be castrated and Burned alive but no they will probably out in a few years to do it all again..They probably robbed this method of Anons anyway and just claiming credit..

[mona]

This is how the government is catching people,

who use child porn sites

 

 

The FBI is using hacking techniques to target criminals. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

 

By Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post;    January 21 at 3:54 PM

 

 

The user’s online handle was “Pewter,” and while logged on at a website called Playpen, he allegedly downloaded images of young girls being sexually molested.

 

Pewter had carefully covered his tracks. To reach the site, he first had to install free software called Tor, the world’s most widely used tool for giving users anonymity online.

 

In order to uncover Pewter’s true identity and location, the FBI quietly turned to a technique more typically used by hackers. The agency, with a warrant, surreptitiously placed computer code, or malware, on all computers that logged into the Playpen site. When Pewter connected, the malware exploited a flaw in his browser, forcing his computer to reveal its true Internet protocol address. From there, a subpoena to Comcast yielded his real name and address.

 

Pewter was unmasked last year as Jay Michaud, a 62-year-old public schools administrator in Vancouver, Wash. With a second warrant, agents searched the suspect’s home and found a thumb drive that allegedly contained multiple images of children engaged in sex acts. Last July, Michaud was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.l

 

Pewter had carefully covered his tracks. To reach the site, he first had to install free software called Tor, the world’s most widely used tool for giving users anonymity online.

 

In order to uncover Pewter’s true identity and location, the FBI quietly turned to a technique more typically used by hackers. The agency, with a warrant, surreptitiously placed computer code, or malware, on all computers that logged into the Playpen site. When Pewter connected, the malware exploited a flaw in his browser, forcing his computer to reveal its true Internet protocol address. From there, a subpoena to Comcast yielded his real name and address.

 

Pewter was unmasked last year as Jay Michaud, a 62-year-old public schools administrator in Vancouver, Wash. With a second warrant, agents searched the suspect’s home and found a thumb drive that allegedly contained multiple images of children engaged in sex acts. Last July, Michaud was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography.

 

Michaud’s is the lead case in a sweeping national investigation into child porn on what is known as the dark Web, a universe of sites that are off Google’s radar where users can operate with anonymity.

 

As criminals become more savvy about using technology such as Tor to hide their tracks, investigators are turning to hacking tools to thwart them. In some cases, members of law enforcement agencies are placing malware on sites that might have thousands of users. Some privacy advocates and analysts worry that in doing so, investigators may also wind up hacking and identifying the computers of law-abiding people who are seeking to remain anonymous, people who can also include political dissidents and journalists.

[FBI’s search for suspect in bomb threats highlights use of malware for surveillance]

 

“As the hacking techniques become more ambitious, failure in execution can lead to large-scale privacy and civil liberties abuses at home and abroad,” said Ahmed Ghappour, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law. “It’s imperative that Congress step in to regulate exactly who and how law enforcement may hack.”

 

But Justice Department officials said that the government investigates crimes based on evidence of illegal activities. “When we obtain a warrant, it’s because we have convinced a judge that there is probable cause that we’ll be able to find evidence in a particular location,” said a senior department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the department.

 

In the Playpen case, the government activated malware on a site with 215,000 members, as of last February, and obtained Internet protocol addresses of 1,300 computers. Out of that group, the government said it has charged 137 people.

 

“It’s a lot of people,” said Colin Fieman, a public defender in Tacoma, Wash., who is representing Michaud. “There never has been any warrant I’ve seen that allows searches on that scale. It is unprecedented.”

 

Michaud is arguing to have his charges dismissed on grounds that the government’s use of the tool violated the Fourth Amendment. Fieman argues that some people might have gone to the site seeking to express fantasies that, while repugnant, are legal. The site, he said, does not clearly advertise itself as devoted to child pornography.

 

He likened the government’s warrant to a “general warrant,” referring to the British practice during the Colonial era of allowing government searches without any individualized suspicion.

 

The judge in Michaud’s case is scheduled Friday to hear several motions that could result in the dismissal of charges against him.

 

“This is a gray area in the law,” said Thomas Brown, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who has handled cases involving the use of hacking techniques. “It’s another instance where you’ve got technology outstripping the law.”

 

Fieman also said that rules established by the federal courts, grounded in constitutional principles, require that a warrant be deployed in the district in which it is issued — in this case, the Eastern District of Virginia. Michaud’s computer was in Vancouver.

 

But prosecutors argue that the technique is lawful and that, in general, a warrant may be issued even when the location to be searched is unknown, as long as there is probable cause that the search will turn up evidence of a crime.

 

“The Supreme Court has made clear that the Fourth Amendment . . . does not preclude use of warrants where the purpose of the search is to discover the location of the place to be searched,” said David Bitkower, then a deputy assistant attorney general, in a December 2014 letter to a fed­eral courts committee weighing changes to the rule that governs how search warrants are issued.

 

In the Playpen case, the government argued that it had probable cause to search the computers of anyone who navigated to the site — whether one person or 10,000 people — on the grounds that the site was devoted to child porn and anybody who knew how to get to it probably did so with the intent to view the content. The site cannot be found through a Google search and can be reached only by users who know its exact, algorithm-generated Web address and are using special software that connects to the Tor network.

 

In such a case, “we have an obligation to investigate all 10,000 [people], not just one,” prosecutor Keith Becker told Judge Robert J. Bryan of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in December at a hearing in Tacoma.

 

The FBI seized Playpen last year, and after operating it for two weeks, shut it down. During those two weeks, according to court documents, it deployed what it obliquely calls a “network investigative technique,” or NIT, to capture the Internet protocol address of anyone who logged in on the website.

 

“In general, the Constitution doesn’t say that we have to stop investigating just because we need to use a computer technique to identify suspects rather than opening a letter or entering a private house,” said the senior Justice official. “The law doesn’t give online pedophiles immunity from court-authorized search warrants just because they’re using modern software.”

 

Fieman also argued that the government itself violated the law when it seized Playpen last year, then rather than shut it down immediately or find ways to reroute visitors, continued to operate the child-porn site.

 

“What the government did is comparable to flooding a neighborhood with heroin in the hope of snaring an assortment of low-level drug users,” Fieman said in a motion to dismiss filed in November.

 

Justice spokesman Peter Carr said that “at no time in an operation like this does the FBI post any images, videos or links to images of child pornography.” Any such postings are done by website users, not the FBI, he said. Also, he said, immediately shutting down a website would prevent law enforcement from identifying the offenders and frustrate efforts to identify and rescue child victims from abuse.

 

Without using the hacking technique, officials said, it would be very difficult to locate pedophiles who go to great lengths to hide their tracks.

 

The issue, said Ghappour, the law professor, is not the use of the malware per se, but “whether hacking warrants are written narrowly enough to guarantee that only those culpable set the trigger [to launch the NIT], and consequently get hacked,” he said. “Given the scale of these operations, the smallest mistake could result in hundreds, if not thousands, of privacy violations.”

 

Privacy advocates concerned about the government doing mass hacks point to the case of TorMail, an anonymous email service, now shuttered. TorMail, which despite the name is not affiliated with the group behind Tor, was used by a range of people, from criminals to dissidents and journalists.

 

In the summer of 2013, reports surfaced of people trying to log in to TorMail and finding a “down for maintenance” message instead, then finding suspicious-looking code included in the TorMail Web page. Security researchers who analyzed the code concluded that it was likely placed there by the FBI.

 

At the time, the government would not confirm that the bureau was behind the hack. This week, people familiar with the investigation confirmed that the FBI had used an NIT on TorMail. But, they said, the bureau obtained a warrant that listed specific email accounts within TorMail for which there was probable cause to think that the true user was engaged in illicit child-pornography activities. In that way, the sources said, only suspects whose accounts had in some way been linked to involvement in child porn would have their computers infected.

 

An FBI official who spoke under a similar condition of anonymity said the bureau recognizes that the use of an NIT is “intrusive” and should only be deployed “in the most serious cases.” He said the FBI uses the tool only against offenders who are “the worst of the worst.”

 

 

 

Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter for The Washington Post. She focuses on issues relating to intelligence, technology and civil liberties.

 

 

Source

 

[knowledge-Spammer]

In order to uncover Pewter’s true identity and location, the FBI quietly turned to a technique more typically used by hackers. The agency, with a warrant, surreptitiously placed computer code, or malware, on all computers that logged into the Playpen site. When Pewter connected, the malware exploited a flaw in his browser, forcing his computer to reveal its true Internet protocol address. From there, a subpoena to Comcast yielded his real name and address.

 

 smart trick

[SURbit]

Quote

“This is a gray area in the law,” said Thomas Brown, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who has handled cases involving the use of hacking techniques. “It’s another instance where you’ve got technology outstripping the law.” [technology outstripping the law] outstripping = outdo; surpass; excel, exceed.

 

When can the public at large see this happen of more sites - like file sharing, torrents, warze, this here site, really a thing to question and the abuses of it by government 3 initial departments as well as home town cops...

 

Quote

But prosecutors argue that the technique is lawful and that, in general, a warrant may be issued even when the location to be searched is unknown, as long as there is probable cause that the search will turn up evidence of a crime.

 

Total BS a warrant should state an address or some item of personal property, so xyz came to my place 5 months ago and has just gotten busted for dope and we had texted to each other in that time since 5 months ago, same with 150 of others texts on xyz phone, the phones GPS reads the location of each, so the above quote I understand that all151 people can be searched for probable cause of evidence of a crime. In other words one links all 151 together for Dope.

 

 

Quote

“In general, the Constitution doesn’t say that we have to stop investigating just because we need to use a computer technique to identify suspects rather than opening a letter or entering a private house,” said the senior Justice official.

 

I think that certain parts of the Constitution need to be brought up to speed of the digital age, that is transparent for all the people

not just law enforcement and judges to interpret as they see fit. 

[CODYQX4]

44 minutes ago, SURbit said:

 

When can the public at large see this happen of more sites - like file sharing, torrents, warze, this here site, really a thing to question and the abuses of it by government 3 initial departments as well as home town cops...

 

 

Total BS a warrant should state an address or some item of personal property, so xyz came to my place 5 months ago and has just gotten busted for dope and we had texted to each other in that time since 5 moths ago, same with 150 of others texts on xyz phone, the phones GPS reads the location of each, so the above quote I understand that all151 people can be searched for probable cause of evidence of a crime. In other words one links all 151 together for Dope.

 

 

 

I think that certain parts of the Constitution need to be brought up to speed of the digital age, that is transparent for all the people

not just law enforcement and judges to interpret as they see fit. 

 

It is pretty disgusting that they think those who wrote the 4th amendment would have said, "oh, you can just send a spy drone? That's OK and totally not an invasion of privacy, carry on".

[Reefa]

Topics Merged.

[rahull]

Good ....fbi did the job......can they use the same or similar techniques to unerthen antisocial elements or terrorists........that will be better......

[CODYQX4]

1 hour ago, rahull said:

Good ....fbi did the job......can they use the same or similar techniques to unerthen antisocial elements or terrorists........that will be better......

Problem is that terminology can be applied to whoever the government doesn't like. A nonviolent protest that is 100% legal could be classified as such.

 

But a kiddy diddler is pretty easy to define category, and the cure is even simpler - a bullet to the head.

[Reefa]

Court Upholds 2013 Child Porn Conviction Where the FBI Hacked a Tor-Hidden Site

Earlier this month, the FBI hacked a child pornography site on the dark web, and ran it for over a week, collecting IP addresses from users, in “the largest law enforcement hacking campaign to date.” One defense team in that case has now argued that the FBI itself had peddled child porn. On January 21st, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a conviction in a very similar case from 2013.

 

In US v. Welch, the FBI used a hacking tool on the site Pedobook, and captured the IP address of Brian Welch. Welch was later convicted of “receiving, attempting to receive, and accessing with intent to view child pornography.”

 

Although the conviction was upheld, the court did decide that the FBI had violated Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(f). Rule 41 requires that a copy of the search warrant must be provided to the owner of the property seized. It’s a rule that most people can’t name, but are generally familiar with—movies and television frequently depict the police knocking on the door and brandishing pieces of paper.

 

Of course, the rules turn out a little differently when the police are, say, tapping phones or hacking Tor-hidden services. A statute can allow delaying showing the warrant for thirty days, or even longer if law enforcement seeks an extension.

 

In this case—like in the law enforcement takedown of child pornography site Playpen last year— the FBI left the site running and installed a hacking tool, which is known as a NIT, or “Network Investigative Technique”. The NIT provided “agents with information about any user who accessed certain content on PedoBook.”

 

The FBI used the NIT in November 2012, and arrested Brian Welch in April 2013—far more than thirty days after the execution of the warrant. The FBI believed that the thirty days began to count down the day that the agency identified “Brian Welch” as a suspect—which it said was a few days prior to arrest. (On the other hand, the FBI had received the subscriber information for Welch’s IP address from his internet service provider in December—122 days before they arrested him and showed him the warrant).

 

This is an extremely technical violation of the law, and one that didn’t even rebound on investigators in this case, since their error was in good faith—if it wasn’t a reckless mistake, it can’t be used to exclude evidence.

 

No one wants to side with child pornographers, but both the Playpen investigation and US v. Welch bring up troubling questions. These investigative techniques involve a government-sponsored hack, and have the potential to sweep up huge numbers of people. Yet whatever limits there are on these searches, they are meager.

 

The reason why can be illustrated in Rule 41, which is clearly designed around a basic case scenario where an officer knocks on a real-life door and searches a real-life location. And it’s not just Rule 41. This is an archetypal scene that much of the constitutional law around search and seizure is based on.

 

Yet the use of NITs is so different from a physical search that it might as well come from another universe. I mean, this is a story about hacking tools, the dark web, and a hidden child pornography distributor. It’s even very different from wiretapping in general. In order to execute this search and the search in the Playpen case, the FBI not only hacked, but then arguably went on to run a child pornography site.

 

The limits there are to these searches are apparently just procedural issues like Rule 41. The law doesn’t anticipate this kind of search, and apparently, cannot express whatever uneasiness the ordinary person might have about it. If the dark web spawns unprecedented kinds of crimes, it also spawns unprecedented kinds of police searches. It will be a while before constitutional limitations catch up—if they ever catch up at all.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/court-upholds-2013-child-porn-conviction-where-fbi-hacked-tor-hidden-site

 

 

[Pequi]

2 hours ago, F3dupsk1Nup said:

the FBI not only hacked, but then arguably went on to run a child pornography site.

Yes, they ran it for 30 days. And even then did not arrest a single producer of the sick material. It's done in studios, with cameramen, producers, editors etc, for a PROFIT. I see a parallel with going after small-time drug consumers and shielding the wholesale importers.

4 hours ago, Joe13 said:

 

You are so wrong, it's not funny. Child rapists purposely seek out this crap online, and in the real world. They know what they are doing is wrong.

 

Lastly, first hand experience gives you an insiders view on how their sick minds operate, and how far they'll go to achieve sexual nirvana at your expense.

Funny ? I must have missed the joke. Please read my post again.

[steven36]

19 minutes ago, Pequi said:

Yes, they ran it for 30 days. And even then did not arrest a single producer of the sick material. It's done in studios, with cameramen, producers, editors etc, for a PROFIT. I see a parallel with going after small-time drug consumers and shielding the wholesale importers.

 

How do you know they didn't arrest  no one who made it?  if they did it would not be the same case. They arrest people  all the time for making  if you read the news  . This  is just 1 case  out of 1000s a year . You think these pedos  are wide open were there easy to catch ?  To me anyone that looks at it should be jailed  it  takes possible rapist off the street . Theres many ways they catch pedos this just one method of doing it.

[Reefa]

Judge in FBI Hacking Case Is Unclear on How FBI Hacking Works

As criminals continue to protect themselves with encryption and anonymization tech, cops are moving to hacking as an investigatory tool. Over the years, the FBI in particular has launched several campaigns to obtain data from suspects' computers via malware, often using the term “Network Investigative Technique”, or NIT, to describe the software being used.

 

But a problem in some NIT cases is that judges have trouble understanding, even in general terms, what a hacking tool is, what they do, or how they work. To be clear, this isn't to place all blame on judges. Instead, it's arguably a problem stemming from how the Department of Justice and the FBI have framed and referred to NITs in legal documents, meaning that some judges may not fully realise the power and scope of the searches that they authorise.

 

On Friday, a hearing was held in Seattle dealing with the case of Jay Michaud, a Vancouver, Washington public school administration worker arrested on child pornography charges last year. He was charged after FBI investigators seized Playpen, a Tor hidden service, and then hosted it from their own servers. From here, the FBI deployed a NIT designed to target users of the site and return their real IP address, amongst other technical information.

 

During the hearing, Judge Robert. J Bryan seemed to not understand how a NIT, or, more broadly, a piece of information-siphoning malware works. This confusion, in part, arose from the language used in NIT warrants and supporting documents. The word “hack,” is never used, and neither is “malware” or “exploit,” for that matter. Instead, the procedure of malware being downloaded to a target's computer is largely obfuscated in vague terminology.

 

“In the normal course of operation, web sites send content to visitors,” reads the application for a search warrant as part of Operation Torpedo, when a NIT was deployed on a number of hidden services in 2012.

 

“A user's computer downloads that content and uses it to display web pages on the user's computer. Under the NIT authorized by this warrant, the web site would augment that content with some additional computer instructions,” it continues.

 

This section also appeared in the Playpen NIT documentation, which Judge Bryan held particular issue with.

 

“You see, that is the kind of paragraph I don't understand fully,” he said during the hearing, pointing to the line that describes how websites send content to visitors, according to a court transcript. “And I am trying to understand."

 

A hangup also occurred around the misinterpretation of “instructions”—Judge Bryan used the word in the context of a human following a list of instructions, but the warrant refers to computer code as instructions.

 

Another exchange showed how it can be difficult for judge’s to conceptualise where data obtained from malware is sourced from, and where it goes.

 

“Do the FBI experts have any way to look at the NIT information other than going to the server?” Judge Bryan asked.

 

“Your Honor, they don't go to the server,” Colin Fieman, a federal public defender who is representing Michaud, replied.

 

“Where do they go? How do they get the information?”

 

“They get it from Mr. Michaud's computer.”

 

“They don't have his computer.”

 

“That's what the NIT is for,” Fieman explained.

 

This back and forth continues for several pages in the transcript, and testimony around the use of the NIT was also given by FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin, who worked on identifying suspected Playpen users.

 

In short, Judge Byran, despite hearing the views of those who took part in the investigation, and having read the briefs submitted by the defense and prosecution several times, could not fully grasp what the NIT was doing.

 

“If a smart federal judge still has trouble understanding after hours of expert testimony what is actually going on,” then the average judge signing warrant applications has little hope of truly understanding what the FBI is proposing, Nate Wessler, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Motherboard in a phone interview. (The ACLU has agreed to a protective order for the Michaud case, allowing it access to the sealed filings.)

 

“It appears in this case, and that's consistent with other cases we've seen elsewhere in the country involving use of malware, the government explanations and warrant applications are quite sparse, and do not fully explain to judges how these technologies works,” Wessler added.

 

As the hearing continued, Judge Byran said “I suppose there is somebody sitting in a cubicle somewhere with a keyboard doing this stuff. I don't know that. It may be they seed the clouds, and the clouds rain information. I don't know.”

 

There is also the issue of documents arguably not being entirely clear about where the actual search of a computer is going to take place.

 

In previous warrants, including that of Operation Torpedo, investigators have written that the search will take place within the issuing district, “and elsewhere.” In the Playpen case, however, that phrase has been omitted, leaving only the district in which the warrant was signed.

 

“This search happened on a computer located in Vancouver, Washington,” Fieman said in the hearing, referring to his client's computer. “The warrant on its face is limited to persons and property in the Eastern District of Virginia.”

 

Keith Becker, an attorney from the Department of Justice, said in the hearing that the warrant “clearly requested the authorities to deploy to computers wherever located.”

 

Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan in the Eastern District of Virginia, who signed the NIT warrant for the Playpen case, was not available for comment. “Judge Buchanan does not respond to media inquiries,” Christian Schreiber, a law clerk to the judge, told Motherboard in an email. The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

 

“When it comes to this kind of secret and hard to understand technological search, the government holds all the cards, and it is crucial that the government be very careful to explain itself fully and accurately,” Wessler added.

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/judge-in-fbi-hacking-case-is-unclear-on-how-fbi-hacking-works

 

[ugurano]

on darknet to much on this sites, that fucked up, fuck pedos