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 access the servers he was using.
This way the feds were able to install a network investigative technique (NIT) that helped them find real IP and MAC addresses. For those who don't know Playpen was hidden in the anonymous Tor network, and the spyware was necessary to unmask the suspects (about 1.300 IP addresses were collected during the server's operation by the FBI).
According to the prosecution, a raid of her polices at the perpetrator's house revealed a lot of photos and videos of child sexual abuse on his computers. But guilty or not, it doesn't matter because the FBI filed a motion to end the prosecution [PDF] at the end of the previous month.
Why
Because Michaud's attorney was persistently asking the FBI for a sample of the NIT code he used to review to ensure he did not violate the terms of the warrant the FBI used to installation of malware.
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 to Article 41 of the Federal Criminal Procedure Code approving such international warrants entered into force on December 1 of the previous year.
And in the past the FBI has stopped prosecutions to reveal their investigative techniques, particularly with the equipment monitoringof mobile Stingray. But the cases were few and far between and not as serious as cases of child sexual abuse.
