With a rather worrying and unexpected move, the FBI stopped prosecution against a man accused of taking pictures of child sexual abuse, not to reveal details of how they were traced.
Jay Michaud, a Washington-based teacher from Vancouver, was arrested in July last year after his visit to Playpen, a dark web web site for tens of thousands of perverts who use it to exchange pictures and porn videos and abuse of minors.
Unknowingly at the time of his visit, the FBI was for about a fortnight, the site administrator, when he managed to obtain access on the servers he used.
In this way, the federations managed to set up a network investigation technique or network investigative technique (NIT) to help them find real IP and MAC addresses. For those who did not know Playpen was hidden in the anonymous Tor network, and spyware was necessary to uncover the suspects (about 1.300 IP addresses were collected during the FBI server runtime).
According to the prosecutor's office, a police raid at the actor's house revealed too many photos and videos of child sexual abuse on his computers. But guilty or not, it does not matter why the FBI filed an application to stop the prosecution [PDF] at the end of the previous month.
Why
Because Michaud's lawyer was insisting the FBI get a sample of it code NIT που χρησιμοποίησε για να ελεγχθεί για να εξασφαλιστεί ότι δεν παραβίασε τους όρους του εντάλματος που χρησιμοποίησε το FBI για την εγκατάσταση του malicioussoftware.
The US District Judge Robert Bryan agreed, saying that if the prosecution did not produce the code he would have to dismiss the charges.
The Playpen case has proven to be a legal minefield in more than one way. For starters, the assumption that the same FBI for 15 days at least shared images and videos of child abuse had troubled many.
Continuing the service requested only one warrant for the distribution of NIT spyware worldwide, which was illegal at the time.
This is no longer the case, since the change in article 41 of the federal regulation of criminal procedure authorizing such international warrants entered into force on December 1 of the previous year.
And in the past the FBI has stopped prosecution to uncover their research techniques, particularly with Stingray mobile tracking equipment. However, the cases were minimal and were not as severe as cases of child sexual abuse.
