For 12 days this past February and March, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ran the largest child pornography site in the world, Playpen. According to released documents recently, Playpen wasn't the only child pornography site on the FBI's servers.
If you don't remember how it happened: the FBI took over the webσελίδα, and started running it on government servers for 13 days trying to trap pedophiles with malware. With the malware, known to law enforcement as a "network investigative technique" (NIT), they attempted to infiltrate the TORs of users who had accessed the site through the Dark Web. 
According to a sworn statement by the FBI:
In its usual course operation of a website, the user sends “requests data” on the website, to gain access to this site. Websites 1-23 operated at government facilities, and thus data related to a user's actions on Websites 1-23 are collected. Data collection is not a function of NIT. Such data (requests) may be combined with the data collected by NIT in order to identify a specific user and their actions on websites 1-23.
Simply put, "websites 1-23" operated for the government indefinitely, in an effort to arrest pedophiles.
Why do we mention "halves" in the title? Sarah Jamie Lewis, a security researcher, told Ars Technica:
"It makes a lot of sense for the FBI to run almost half of all known child pornography sites hosted on Tor."
Lewis runs OnionScan, an analytics tool that uses bots to map the Dark Web by searching vulnerable points. It began an investigation in April this year, and by August, it had mapped 29 child pornography sites hidden on Tor servers.
Of course, for the above actions, the FBI is not so legal, as with the use of a single warrant it has managed to break thousands of computers. Only in the Playpen survey were 1.300 unique Internet addresses (IP).
Of these, fewer than 100 cases found their way to the court where the judges in Iowa, Massachusetts and Oklahoma judged that the FBI's investigation was illegal.
Of course the real crime is elsewhere:
There is no doubt that any child abuse (let alone sexual) is one of the worst crimes, but the way the FBI handled the case is equally alarming. Imagine that they allowed these sites to work with the victims, indicating the pretext of the investigation.
In a world we want to be bound by law, the FBI itself is committing the same crime as the criminals behind the rails. We should all ask ourselves whether the facilitation of child sexual abuse deserves to capture 100 of some alleged pedophiles.
