> ...and then kept the site online so they could make further arrests of people who viewed the site.

> That's a massively different picture...

No, it isn't. The USG treats every instance of child pornography as a separate occurrence of a crime against the child. That is the way they've structured it so that they can convict as many people as possible, not just the individuals responsible for production. In this case the USG, by their own standard, committed an untold number of crimes against these children by keeping the site up and acting as a distributor. There is no difference between this and them setting up a honey pot full of CP.