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 do not remember how it happened: the FBI captured the website and started running it on government servers for 13 days trying to trap pedophiles with malicious software. With malicious software, known to law enforcement and network investigation techniques (NIT), they tried to penetrate the TOR of the users who had accessed the site through Dark Web. 
According to a sworn statement by the FBI:
In the normal course of operating 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 for 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 managed to violate thousands of computers. In the Playpen survey alone, there were 1.300 unique addresses Internet (PI).
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.
