Playpen pervert to face no minimum sentence; federal prosecutors to keep public, but still-classified, WikiLeaks docs from being exposed.

Federal prosecutors in Tacoma, Washington have dropped TWO cases related to child pornography that David Tippens acquired through the now-defunct website “Playpen”, which hosted child porn hidden via Tor.

This means Tippens will face only one count of possession of child pornography, which carries NO minimum sentence – this scum will go without any real penalty.

Tippens is only part of a much larger story: over 200 prosecutions are taking place nationwide that are related to the Playpen situation. The FBI ran the site for 13-days in 2015 before shutting it down, which was one of the most unprecedented, and not to mention illegal, hacking operations that we know of.

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An Ars Technica article discussed the details in depth:

Federal authorities deployed an exploit to logged-in users of the site, which had the effect of forcing users’ computers to expose their true IP address. With such information, translating an IP address into a person’s name became trivial for the investigators. The Department of Justice has called this exploit a “network investigative technique,” (NIT) while many security experts have dubbed it as “malware.”

The controversy of the Tippens case comes down to lawyers neglecting to utilize new legal guides (detailed in another Ars Technica article) that would allow for the still-classified leaked documents from WikiLeaks to be used as evidence. The technicalities active in this case present a slew of new and difficult realities for lawyers attempting to understand the technological elements of such cases in relation to government hacking and leaked documents that are both public and classified.

The judge summarized the government’s ability to, “hack into a computer without leaving any trace that it had been hacked or that an exploit had been placed on it,” knowing full well the loaded nature of these revelations.

The result of the ambiguity in the case and the failure of the FBI means that Tippens was successful in getting the judge to remove two counts: 1) receipt of child pornography; 2) transportation of child pornography, which, if coupled together, would mean a 5 to 20-year sentence. Sad and disgusting.