The FBI May Have Run Not Just One But 24 Dark Web Child-Porn Websites

The FBI received a judge’s permission to run 23 child pornography websites. The FBI was previously exposed for operating a child pornography site for two weeks.

The sites are thought to have accounted for roughly half of all child porn websites on the dark web.

The FBI has a controversial new method of fighting child pornography: distributing child pornography. As part of “Operation Pacifier,” the federal law-enforcement agency ran a dark-web child porn clearinghouse called The Playpen for two weeks, delivering malware to any site visitors, in a scheme that was revealed last summer. But it turns out that site may not have been the only dark-web site that the FBI maintained. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the agency was actually authorized to takeover 23 child-pornography websites in addition to The Playpen.

According to a recently unsealed FBI affidavit, the 23 Tor-hidden sites were run on one computer server and the FBI requested authority to seize this server and deploy its “network investigative technique” on these sites. During the 30-day deployment period, any visitor to sites 1-23 would receive the NIT instructions (essentially malware), which were “designed to cause the ‘activating’ computer to deliver certain information to a computer controlled by or known to the government,” as the FBI affidavit explained it. This information included the computer’s actual IP address, host name, operating-system type, and MAC address.

Near the end of the affidavit, the FBI notes that “while Websites 1-23 operate at a government facility,” normal user-request data associated with websites 1-23 will be collected” and “such request data can be paired with data collected by the NIT… to attempt to identify a particular user and to determine that particular user’s actions on Websites 1-23.”

Cybercrime lawyer Fred Jennings told Ars Technica, “That paragraph alone doesn’t quite say the FBI is operating” the websites. “But definitely no other way to read that than websites 1-23 were hosted at a government facility, with the FBI’s knowledge and to the FBI’s informational benefit. It’s clever phrasing on their part.”

 

An analysis from security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis found that between April and August 2016, there were 29 Tor-hidden websites devoted to child porn. Lewis told Ars Technica that “it’s a pretty reasonable assumption” that the FBI as running about half of them at some point. “Doing the math, it’s not zero sites, it’s probably not all the sites, but we know that they’re getting authorization for some of them. I think it’s a reasonable assumption—I don’t think the FBI would be doing their job if they weren’t.”


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