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In New York, two men were criminally charged in connection with an FBI investigation of a child pornography website. These two were just a couple of the 200,000+ users this site maintained in its databases. Both men were charged with knowingly possessing such porn.The illegal site in question was “Playpen,” a site that launched in August 2014, with a bulletin board on the dark web requesting users sign up and upload any image. The court described this as the main tactic for “the advertisement and distribution of child pornography.”After its immediate seizure, it still was not shut down, remaining open on the dark web, unlike other sites the FBI have successfully shut down permanently, like Silk Road. Between February 20 and March 4, the FBI went and distributed their hacking tool, known as a network investigative technique (NIT). Playpen was running from its server in Virginia, and the hacking tool continued to infect targets, close to the 1300 IP addresses stated by the court.The Magistrate Judge who signed the warrant for the use of NIT, Theresa C. Buchanan of the Eastern District of Virginia, did not respond when questioned if she knew the warrant would grant the FBI the ability to hack any user of Playpen, and did not respond when questioned about her understanding of the technicalities of the NIT’s abilities.He continued saying that “basically, if you visited the homepage, and started to sign up for a membership, or started to log in, the warrant authorized deployment of the NIT [on these potential users’ computers and IPs].”
