Judge: child porn evidence obtained via FBI’s Tor hack must be suppressed

Generally I'd like to see something like an "Internet District" court with technically trained judges that have jurisdiction over warrants on the internet.

To me, the slippery slope seems to be, how do you know that all the exploit did was obtain the IP address, and not add or alter files on the filesystem, or allow the system to be further compromised by other parties?

It's really surprising the faux moral outrage. Children will continue to be exploited because of technicalities.

Since distribution and even possesion are crimes because they hurt children this argument does not hold up.

You could argue that "mere" possession of such material does not either, yet that is not how the law is interpreted.

> Personally, I don't believe it's moral or ethical for law enforcement to commit crimes in order to catch criminals.

I think you want to look at systemic effects and the potential for bulger-style corruption. Distribution of child porn does not do direct harm. It does harm by being a system that supports child abuse and we have collectively decided that child abuse is harmful enough to the fabric of our society that it is worth dismantling the systems that support it.

So here, the ends justify a certain scoped set of means, but also impose a duty of competence in deploying those means and a duty to stay within their scope.

Note that We don't currently have any penalties for crossing the bounds of that scope.

Isn't that the whole reason it's a drug "war"?

As the saying goes "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."

They don't, or rather aren't supposed to, commit crimes to catch criminals. The laws are written with verbiage indicating who can and can't do what and under what circumstances. There is no real law that just simply states "thou shall not kill" that applies to everyone in every role in every situation. And even if law were equal to ethics, I don't think most people hold ethics without exceptions to whatever general descriptions they use to communicate them.

The problem then is that you've not recorded the user committing a crime (or committing a lesser crime, eg soliciting), only them preparing to commit one.

They could have tried a con like "we lost the site, gaussed it to avoid detection, please re-upload" and collared people for distributing. Not sure how well that would go though.

They didn't just take it over though. They made major improvements which caused the traffic to increase 8x during the time they operated it.

>So taking over a pre-existing site centered around illegal activity and simply seeing who uses it is about as far away from entrapment as you can get.//

Surely though if the site was shut down then the likelihood of the crimes being committed, that were recorded in those 13 days of operation, approaches zero? Would be interesting to see how many of these criminals when caught belong to more than one group.

A cop being undercover inside a criminal operation seems to me like a different category to a whole criminal operation being run by a department of police.

It seems close to entrapment; perhaps like going to an alcoholic rehab centre and offering alcohol around. Sure they could get it somewhere else but cutting off their supply should have been helping them reform already.

Surely that's the rationale behind targeting suppliers of illicit goods. If the argument is "the users will just get it elsewhere" then you should target the users and remove the demand.

This leads to the failure mode wherein all those predisposed to commit crimes of a certain nature aim to become undercover police officers tasked with combating those crimes.

Then they can commit their favorite crime with impunity, at the expense of those too dumb to become cops first.

No one can be above the law. No one. If an undercover officer commits crimes to avoid breaking cover, the police department is culpable, and must pay some penalty. Since a corporate entity can't be jailed, I'm not certain what form of punishment would encourage it to minimize those lesser crimes committed in pursuit of the "big fish", but it is very clear that impunity is dangerous, destructive, and corrupting.

Can a cop commit rape or murder? Normally a cop is only allowed to do minor illegal things that aren't on the level of directly harming a person. Since the government argues child porn directly harms the child (as otherwise it would be protected by the first amendment), a cop should not be allowed to engage in activities related to it.

On a related note, why doesn't the mafia just require any suspected cop to commit rape of some target. Or are cops allowed to go that far?

I think you can build a better case for police buying, or offering to sell, drugs in order to catch criminals than this. Cocaine that isn't actually insufflated doesn't harm anyone. The FBI distributed images of child abuse which are illegal to own or distribute because, so the theory goes, the child is further abused every time someone new sees it. Therefore the FBI was complicit in further abuse of those children. Whether or not LEOs are allowed to commit crimes as part of an investigation, that crosses a serious ethical line. We wouldn't tolerate cops posing as hitmen and committing actual murder to keep the ruse up. Why should we tolerate this?

No. But they can find other means of proving that the defendant has done what you know they have done.