Over a year ago, the FBI conducted an unprecedented hacking operation in which the agency deployed malware to more than one thousand accounts identified as visitors to a single dark web child pornography site. Using more than 8,000 IP addresses, the Bureau hacked computers in 120 different countries.
In a federal court hearing on the case, defense attorney Colin Fieman observed that “We have never, in our nation’s history as far as I can tell, seen a warrant so utterly sweeping – 100,000 potential targets, something like 8700 IP addresses captured. At least 1152 open investigations – and now, oddly enough, only about 214 arrests.”
“What’s even more disturbing, even if they disagree about the efficacy of some of those methods, we now know … there was absolutely no discussion at the Department of Justice or the FBI about protocols in terms of handling this stuff or whether these methods of limiting, at least limiting the most egregious distribution were viable. Nobody cared.”
By seizing control of those computers, “the FBI actually created a child porn `catalog,’ mailed it to sting targets, and sent the targets the child porn they requested,” points out the cyber-journal TechDirt. After establishing themselves as the world’s largest child porn distributors, the FBI “kept the site live and not only distributed what was already hosted there, but allowed users to upload new images to be shared and redistributed.”
Furthermore, “this is the second time the FBI has seized a child porn site only to keep it running.” The agency had previously done the same thing in 2012.
The FBI — we really should just call it the “American Cheka” from here on out — was rewarded for this conduct by being given official permission to carry out even more grandiose hacking and surveillance operations through recently enacted changes to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. As was the case in its Soviet predecessor, the “laws” are constantly changed to accommodate and institutionalize the crimes committed by the security organs of the American soyuz.
