FBI's 'Unprecedented' Hacking Campaign Targeted Over a Thousand Computers
motherboard.vice.com
motherboard.vice.com
Why wouldn't the judges who signed these warrants sign similar warrants to catch suspected terrorists? What about people who visit sites that allegedlly support terrorism? What about sites that support illegal activity such as Marijuana cultivation and use? Online piracy? Trading in technology that subverts copyright protection?
Welcome to the slippery slope...
Indeed :)
Can you expand on how they broke the 4th? There's nothing that indicates they broke the 4th from what I can see.
Search warrants are not supposed to be that easy.
Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan in the Eastern District of Virginia, who signed the warrant used for the NIT, did not respond to questions on whether she understood that the warrant would grant the power to hack anyone who signed up to Playpen, or whether she consulted technical experts before signing it, and her office said not to expect a reply.
So we can't even be sure that a judge knows what she's doing when she's asked to sign a warrant like this. They don't have to prove competence.
My understanding has it that physical warrants cannot say "I'm going to search this building, and also any other buildings I find mentioned there."
Child pornagraphy is a particularly heinous crime is today's society. So don't ever expect the courts to be lienent.
When you have a police force that sees itself as above the law, then you have a very big problem.
They got a warrant. It's exactly what they're suppose to do.
I understand that they got a warrant for the server, but can it really be so broad so that it gives them the legal right to hack into any computer that visits the site?
From the article:
> But Fieman said that the warrant “effectively authorizes an unlimited number of searches, against unidentified targets, anywhere in the world.”
That blatantly isn't a warrant. It's a new form of unlimited government surveillance and hacking. Half the comments on here are falling for the all-too-obvious: but it's for a good cause, spin. Hey, just leave your doors unlocked, and invite in the police to search every inch of your home and electronics any time they like, we'll catch far more criminals that way.
You're telling me your opinion. I would like to know how you don't think it's a warrant by the definition of the law.
One of the primary complaints of the founding fathers was the abuse by the British when it came to general warrants. They specifically attempted to limit warrants just for this very reason, so abusive agents of the government couldn't turn them into general warrants.
The fact that this example warrant allowed for infinite targeting (ie had no actual specific targets in mind), means that it is not a warrant by the definition set over the prior 200 years in the US. It is an obvious general warrant, and non-constitutional.
The warrant in question might have a vague list of targets, but in practise it applies to any and all people that connect to these services. And it's not like you can stumble upon them by googling...
It's that you can issue such a warrant and target massive numbers of people regardless of whether or not you specifically suspect them. The point of the warrant system is to prevent LEOs from searching (you|your property) without knowing what you supposedly did. The warrant issued here allows arbitrary attacks against arbitrary targets, and that's not good, regardless of technology.
I would have the same objection if the FBI had been given information about a string of armed robberies and decided to just catch the criminals after the fact. Protecting innocents and preventing that lives are ruined should take precedence of catching criminals. I can't understand how the people working on this case can live with the knowledge that criminals might have used the Firefox vulnerability to defraud elderly with ransom-ware, or steal information which are later used for identity theft.
Why not just have a judge sign a warrant that gives the police the right to search the homes of "all bad guys?"
I actually think this is a good example of digital police work, as opposed to utterly indiscriminate dragnets and trying to ban or backdoor crypto. This targeted a specific criminal activity and people clearly linking themselves to it. It was not indiscriminate.
It also shows that police work is absolutely possible in a world with crypto, proving the anti-crypto doomsday rhetoric wrong.
This is an argument for privacy around criminal charges since even being charged with CP can ruin someone's reputation. Many civilized countries have this. But this is a separate issue.
There's also the fact that child-abuse porn is lumped in the same basket as harmless pictures of naked children. The latter in itself it harmless - many parents take photos of their children in the bath, etc. But somehow it transforms from good to worse-than-bad if someone gets sexual pleasure from it.
As far as the 'hating drug users' bit goes, I don't particularly like drug users, but to me they're less of a problem than the people that make the drug laws in the first place. Drug addicts are patients just as child porn consumers are patients but in the case of the drug addicts there exists a possible world where their addiction does not have to lead to murderous Mexican drug gangs. I don't see a way in which a child porn consumer gets to have his/her kicks without having to abuse a child and that's why for me the two are different.
> The latter in itself it harmless - many parents take photos of their children in the bath, etc. But somehow it transforms from good to worse-than-bad if someone gets sexual pleasure from it.
This is the law being abused and it is a pity that this is the case. But when normal people use the world child porn they are most likely not talking about parents taking pictures of their children in the bath. If that is your view of what child porn constitutes then I'm really happy for you. Run a site where you can upload videos for a while and do the reviewing, then we'll have this talk again.
I wonder then about viewers of violent crime. If anyone has watched an ISIS beheading video, are they are bad as violent child porn viewers? That seems like a closer analogy - the violence is committed for the purpose of making videos for users to watch - and presumably further some goal of attracting fighters or whatever.
After all, imagine the Nazi's taking selfies and sending multimedia out into the world about what was happening inside the concentration camps. The war would possibly have ended a lot sooner because quite a few people that were still defending the regime and were claiming 'wir haben es nicht gewusst' would have stood up to do something about it. One of those attempts might have succeeded. It would have also served as anti-propaganda in getting other nations to jump on board of the allies train sooner.
I see IS as a last ditch attempt at consolidation, if it fails they might as well not have tried hence their flaunting of all the rules, nothing left to lose.
Not seeing any strong reasons, I suspect the real answer is that people feel hate towards sexual deviants of any sort just as they always have. It used to be gays but now they're off limits, so pedophiles are about all they have left to hate. Maybe that combined with a bit of "think of the children!". There's also widespread hatred toward incest but it doesn't seem so severe, perhaps because when it's adults, only the former emotion applies, not the latter.
That's quite a claim.
> I've seen people openly talking about watching such videos on the internet
Not around me.
> and edited versions are even broadcast on the news.
Again, not any news that I've seen.
We apparently inhabit completely different circles and cultures.
> It's not a crime and it's not demonized.
Posession of child pornography is a crime where I live.
Watching it is hard to criminalize since you can't prove who watched what so I can see why that would not be a crime and should not be a crime.
> Not seeing any strong reasons, I suspect the real answer is that people feel hate towards sexual deviants of any sort just as they always have.
I don't see this either.
You can be a 'sexual deviant' (your words, not mine) all you want, it's fine with me. But the line gets drawn where children get abused and that's why possession of child pornography (and not being of a paedophillic disposition) is a crime.
> It used to be gays but now they're off limits, so pedophiles are about all they have left to hate.
That's an insanely dumb line. Gays are 'off limits' because just like pedophiles they are people first. You don't get to bash gay people for their sexuality (or your own insecurities) any more than you get to bash pedophiles. That's not the point. The pedophiles that get bashed are the ones that act on their urges in such a way that they endanger the people that we happen to cherish most, our (collective) children and their behavior in such situations makes use of the power asymmetry between adults and children (who are all but defenseless).
In that sense the outrage is no less than if a big adult guy would rape a slightly built woman. (Or at least, I would expect it to be no less, it certainly wouldn't be less for me.)
> Maybe that combined with a bit of "think of the children!".
No, we just don't expect the children to stand up for themselves. They're physically weak (in the case of child pornography there does not seem to be a lower limit on what gets people excited, it goes all the way to newborns...), they are small, they generally defer to the authority of the adults present and they end up scarred for life from these ordeals.
> There's also widespread hatred toward incest but it doesn't seem so severe, perhaps because when it's adults, only the former emotion applies, not the latter.
Incest is taboo in many cultures. There are several reasons for that (most of them good, some of them debatable) but the definition of incest is probably not what you think it is (it can involve consent and it may involve only adults). Incest is more about bloodlines than anything else.
Sorry I was unclear. I meant beheading videos. Please reread it with that in mind.
Everything you've said about child porn is only about violent child porn and other kinds of child abuse. I completely agree with you on that. What I'm concerned with is harmless child porn which people still demonize too. For example when a parent's innocent bath video gets leaked to a child porn ring. That does't transform it from OK to bad. It makes no difference to the child. Yet it does become illegal and people do hate the viewers of that video despite the child not being harmed.
The smarter people see no problem in that. The only times those should be used under the child porn label is when they are used in collections having nothing to do with the original people involved.
I have three kids, one older, two younger. There is no way that I'd let a picture of the younger ones without any clothes on get out of my control (the older one is old enough to be his own master now), and I'm extremely protective of what happens with pictures that contain them at all. My main reason for being that careful is that the internet has a habit of destroying data that you'd like to have but it will preserve for ever data that you'd like to go away.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with all this 'oh but childporn isn't so bad', it's almost as if for some reason you feel this is a subject that needs a strong defense without showing why you feel this is the case.
I'm not going to say 'rape isn't the worst crime so let's give rapists a pass' either, absent a motive I can't find myself to side with the criminals in this case.
Though I very much would like the law enforcement officers to stick to the legal side of the line when it comes to pursuing these people simply because I believe that is how the law should work. If that gets lost then we're all complicit in the crimes done in our name and I'd prefer for society to lose out on getting a few criminals caught if that means we get to keep the moral high ground. That's a controversial point with some but it matters to me.
You seem to have given the subject a lot more thought than I ever would, but then again I don't have much reasons to think really hard about what the implications of child pornography would be. My contact with it has been limited to passing it on to law enforcement when detected with as much documentation as I could find on whoever was spreading it around and from that perspective I have very little love for child pornographers no matter what the source of their material and no matter whether or not in your were not harmed because they can't be identified. That's a very very thin bit of ice you're skating on because it all rests on what you feel is the truth. Such a personal perspective at odds with the law and with what society generally believes to be normal can lead to a lot of trouble.
In other words, those people that have vast collections of nude pictures of other peoples children will not have to count on my sympathy if they start brandishing excuses like the ones you listed.
But that's a consequence of the illegality of the drugs, not a consequence of the additions or the drug itself. It could be done without.
There are things the government can legally do which the private citizen cannot.
There must be moral limits or not? This is terrible!
You say that like it's even remotely comparable or germaine. A big fat red herring is what this is.
Returning to the point, you may not like it, but the law says it's legal to set up sting operations by serving child pornography. The ethics are certainly debatable, but you have your answer as to why it's being done: CP is a commodity, not a physical person, and that's fair game for law-enforcement in the same way as guns, drugs and blood-diamonds are fair game.
I don't see how they are unjustly violating someone's privacy in this situation.
It wouldn't take much either (reocities.com) to put this terrible plan into action, it wouldn't take much for a hacker either to pull this stunt on unsuspecting visitors of a compromised site.
Neither of those should have any implications for the visitors of the original site. Web joe-jobs are super easy to put into play.
Not so: one of the primary purposes of TOR is to hide the user's IP address.
Tor is intended to be anonymous, but not absolutely.
Context is important when interpreting text. The context of the quoted text included the question of whether the judge knew, when he or she issued the warrant, that the FBI would try to break into all the computers being used to sign into the site.
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"Instead, the FBI ran Playpen from its own servers in Newington, Virginia"