- “That paragraph alone doesn't quite say the FBI is operating them,” Fred Jennings, a cybercrime lawyer, told Ars. “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.”
Security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis told Ars that “it’s a pretty reasonable assumption” that at one point the FBI was running roughly half of the known child porn sites hosted on Tor-hidden servers. Lewis runs OnionScan, an ongoing bot-driven analysis of the Tor-hidden darknet. Her research began in April 2016, and it shows that as of August 2016, there were 29 unique child porn related sites on Tor-hidden servers.
I have a tinfoil hat theory that Operation Darknet went legit, just because they started making noise again towards the end of 2012, then went silent, then the FBI started going after Freedom Hosting in early 2013. "Work for us and you can have lulz and a salary and we'll pretend we don't know about all the stuff we're giving you a job offer for." Wouldn't be the first time.
They have updated the article. Looks like the FBI only operated the sites for a day or two before shutting them down: ... Joseph Cox, a journalist, pointed out in a Medium post on Saturday that the “network investigative technique” (NIT) data was collected between August 3 and August 5, 2013 against the users of the child porn sites. As of August 4, all of the sites on Freedom Hosting began showing a fake error message to their users, but were actually deploying this NIT as a way to unmask users.UPDATE Sunday 12:41pm ET: We have clarified our original story and headline to more clearly and accurately reflect the fact that while the FBI did take over the 23 child porn sites in question, unlike the Playpen case, the agency does not appear to have actually operated them, or allowed them to continue to operate.
Not the first time the FBI laid the necessary groundwork for people to (attempt) to execute heinous crimes. The more arrests they get the better they look.