What the court seems to have ignored completely is that the FBI is as morally culpable as anyone they try to prosecute by taking over a CP website. They "revictimized" the children who they call to come to victim impact statements by disseminating the material themselves. They used these children as pawns.

Good Ol' J. Edgar must be proud up there in the heavens, shining down upon all of the agents.

I agree Michigan - if it were really about the victims they would have shut the damn thing down - but no they kept it running and I assume suppressed the info that the owner was arrested. I feel a little better that the last commentator in the article says it does not stand legally and will be tossed out - we will see....

It's bad enough when the person on the other end of a sting operation (entrapment) is actually a police officer but it just kind of takes things to another level when the police/ FBI run the prom site and then arrest people for using it... sort of like the cops own the whore house keep on selling the girls, take the $$ AND arrest everybody concerned afterwards? LOL

In the past, the FBI seized a child porn site on the Dark Net and ran that site for a period of time on at least three different occasions.

Playpen was not the first site where the FBI took over and ran the site, allowing child porn to be uploaded, downloaded, and shared by its members----and, as they constantly remind us when they want to send some low level downloader to federal prison, to re-victimize the children in the images and videos. For some reason, it is not re-victimization when the FBI does it.

In 2012, a guy named McGrath ran three child porn sites in Nebraska, one of which was named "PedoBook." They seized those sites and ran them for a period of time.

http://tinyurl.com/h7ukm4f

"This is not the first time the FBI has operated this type of tactic with cases in 2012 and 2013 where the US government again relocated the servers of a known child pornography site to their own and infecting it with malware to expose user computer data. In both stings the FBI was able to file charges against users."

The FBI's first known success was in 2013, when they took down over 100 child porn sites----including the largest, Lolita City--- when they busted Freedom Hosting using an exploit on javascript in the Tor browser. In that operation, the visitor's IP address, MAC address, and name of the computer was sent to the FBI. I am sure they had thousands of people "dead to rights" yet only one man was prosecuted. The people in security and especially those who are involved with or use Tor cannot figure out why so few arrests when so many porn sites were taken down.

The 2013 Freedom Hosting take down literally destroyed the child porn trading on the Dark Net.

http://tinyurl.com/llf9bt2

In the Freedom Hosting operation, the sites were not seized and operated by the FBI, but just shut down after the IP addresses of the visitors were exposed.

rewdiazepam

And let's not forget what the Supreme Court ruled on regarding our fourth ammendment rights.... Now they don't need probable cause and evidence seized during illegal searches can now be used.... We're completely f***ked!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/supreme-court-says-police-may-use-evidence-found-after-illegal-stops.html

Oh and Rew I sent you a small update.

Frog, does this apply to the castle doctrine? In other words, they don't need a warrant to search one's home?

More depressing news regarding warrants, FBI hacking, and assaults on the Fourth Amendment.

The Police State is alive and well in this country.

http://tinyurl.com/zlouppk

http://tinyurl.com/homaj3k

http://tinyurl.com/jg8gb67

http://tinyurl.com/gomu8yu

rewdiazepam

Not yet but that's most likely next and hell all you need to do is go to YouTube to see people homes being illegally busted into and family pets being shot and killed and home owners harassed and beaten. I have plenty of links for vidoes that will make you sick and sad.

i don't give 2 flying sh*ts what they say or claim.
to take over a kiddie porn site and run it, allowing the porn to be downloaded makes them just as dirty and guilty as the rest of them!!! and then to compile their OWN files of kiddie porn and allow it to be downloaded? OMG i don't even have the words!!!

I agree Echo!

I've said it many times and I will say it again. I don't feel revictimized by whatever photos are out there being viewed because I don't know that they are being viewed. The thing that disgusts me is the FBI and the police are they ones screaming we are revictimized by those pictures being seen, yet they are the ones distributing them. The very people who say we are forever victimized are then making us that victim again. What horrifies me even more is that the public agrees with this tactic to a point. I was having a conversation with one person and he said "I am sorry what you went through, but aren't you happy those who hurt you are being caught?" No, those people NEVER hurt me. The person who took the pictures hurt me. What hurts is the law enforcement, those who never helped me, never saved me are spreading that crap around "catching the bad guys." Hosting a CP site isn't saving anyone. Its disgusting and they aren't even getting the real bad guys, the producers.