In February and March that passed over 12 days, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ran the world's largest child pornography site, Playpen. According to recently released documents, Playpen was not the only child pornography site on the FBI servers.
If you don't remember how it happened: the FBI took over the website, 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 Dark Web. 
According to a sworn statement by the FBI:
During the normal course of operation of a website, the user sends "data requests" to the website, to gain access to this site. Websites 1-23 operated on government facilities, so data related to a user's actions on websites 1-23 is collected. Data collection is not a function of NIT. Such data (requests) can be combined with the data collected by NIT, in order to identify a specific user and his actions on pages 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 analysis tool that uses bots για να χαρτογραφήσει το Dark Web αναζητώντας vulnerabilities. Start one research In April of this year, and in August, he 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.
