900 suspected pedophiles arrested as darknet child porn kingpin jailed for 30yrs

rt.com

3 pointsnom2 comments

It took over two years but 368 child molesters all over the world were charged (from 870 arrested) and 300 hundred children have been rescued from the clutches of these horrible people.

Nice! Playpen is finally cracked. FBI and Europol, keep up the good work! I wonder how they did it.

>I wonder how they did it.

From the article:

"The FBI has been criticized for what it called a “court-approved network investigative technique” used to unearth information about the suspects. It emerged that the agency, with court approval, seized and ran the pedophile website for 13 days in February 2015.

The FBI’s command of the Playpen site enabled the agency to infect over 8,000 users’ computers with malware and hack them. Notably, the site was said to be more efficient and even experienced a boost in audience numbers with the FBI in charge of its content."

This has been covered before on HN. See:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/fbi-operated-23-...

HN comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930735

Reply on news.ycombinator.com