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FBI over-killed in bid to take out kiddie pornographers

by on14 February 2017


Hacked 8,700 computers in 120 countries with just one warrant


Privacy experts have complained in court that the FBI might have just overstepped itself by hacking 8,700 computers in 120 countries, based on a single warrant.

Scarlet Kim, a legal officer with UK -based Privacy International said that the FBI believed that the warrant gave it the right to hack PCs in other countries without asking.

That group, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, filed briefs in a lawsuit involving the FBI’s hacking operation against Playpen.

There will be very little sympathy for the victims which were by all accounts  customers of a kiddy porn outfit which was accessible through Tor. In 2014, the FBI managed to take it over.

However, what it did next may have crossed a line. It decided to infect visitors with malware to track them down. It also happened to hack into computers from 120 countries.

The three privacy groups filed briefs in a case involving Alex Levin, a suspect in the FBI’s Playpen investigation who’s appealing the way the agency used malware to gather evidence against him.

Privacy International claims that the warrant the FBI used to conduct the hacking is invalid. This is because the US was overstepping its bounds by investigating outside its borders without the consent of affected countries, the group said.

Privacy International points out that if a foreign country had carried out a similar hacking operation that affected US citizens the US would scream blue murder.

The EFF and ACLU also claim that the FBI’s warrant was invalid and are quoting the US Constitution, which protects citizens from unreasonable searches.

EFF attorney Mark Rumold wrote in a blog post that based on a single warrant, the FBI searched 8,000 computers located all over the world. If the FBI tried to get a single warrant to search 8,000 houses, such a request would unquestionably be denied.”

Allowing the Playpen suspects “to evade capture and carry on abusing children in the dark shadows of Tor would be repugnant to justice,” the US attorneys argued in court in October.

Last modified on 14 February 2017
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