Australian Police Ran A Dark Web Child Porn Site For Eleven Months

from the presiding-over-a-period-of-unprecedented-growth dept

Thanks to an investigation by Norwegian newspaper VG, a long-running child porn operation by Australian police has been (inadvertently) uncovered. An IT specialist at VG was monitoring forum activity and only stumbled on law enforcement's involvement on accident.

In comparison to the FBI's takeover of the Playpen site, the Taskforce Argos operation was epic. The FBI held onto the seized Playpen seizure for only a couple of weeks. The Australian police served as replacement administrators for eleven months.

The government's turn as child porn site administrators began with the arrest of two men in the United States, one of them a Canadian citizen. Both were apparently actively abusing children as well as running the dark web site. According to data gathered by investigators, Childs Play had more than a 1 million registered users by the time it was shut down. (Estimates suggest fewer than 5,000 accounts could be considered active, however.) Based on estimates from multiple countries now involved in the law enforcement action, the eleven-month hosting effort has resulted in nearly 1,000 suspects being identified. Some have already been arrested.

The article is worth a read (as is the Guardian's more succinct take), if for no other reason than the sheer amount of detective work performed by a few journalists. The ends are worthy -- the arrest and punishment of child abusers -- but, as in the FBI's child porn operations, the means are highly questionable.

Presumably Australian law enforcement used something similar to the FBI's malware to reveal identifying information about the forum's users. No details have been provided to VG, but there's a good chance details will begin to surface as cases proceed to trial.

But it is concerning law enforcement felt a need to continue to distribute child porn for eleven months before deciding to shut down the site. It also seems highly possible the site was only shut down was because the operation had been uncovered by VG's detective work.

While impersonating one of the arrested forum moderators, police had to provide a monthly update post to prevent the site's warrant canary from kicking in. One requirement was to include a child porn image with this update, under the assumption law enforcement officers wouldn't be legally allowed to distribute this contraband.

That leads directly to another problematic aspect of the investigation: the website was relocated for easier exploitation.

It is VG’s understanding that when WarHead surrendered access to Childs Play and Giftbox each forum was stored on servers in separate European countries. Police, lawyers and the suspects themselves refuse to say which. Police in Australia and the European country saw obvious benefits to having the Australian police, rather than a European force, running the site. Australian laws give the police unusually broad powers to monitor suspicious activities online.

By consolidating the operation under Australian jurisdiction, investigators now had legal latitude to distribute child porn. The police may not have distributed much directly, but during the eleven months the site operated under new ownership, business was booming. According to statistics compiled by VG's investigation, hosted images quadrupled during that period, from 3,000 to over 12,000 total image. And some of the uploaded images became incredibly popular.

On 25 October 2016, two weeks after Argos took over the site, an unidentified user created a discussion thread featuring images of an eight-year-old girl being raped. By August of this year, the post had been viewed 770,617 times – all while the police were running the website.

Some victims of child sexual abuse interviewed by VG are upset their images were redistributed by law enforcement. Others are a bit more pragmatic about the investigators' actions. But the redistribution of child porn by law enforcement raises a bunch of questions no one in law enforcement seems interested in answering.

Carissa Byrne Hessick, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina, questions [investigator Paul] Griffith’s argument. She is one of the world’s leading legal experts on investigating such abuse. "It sounds like the police tell one story about how damaging the images are when others share them, and another story when the police share them. That’s a kind of hypocrisy I really don’t like. But this sheds light on the argument that any and all sharing of such an image is abuse. If the police say they’re only sharing images that have been shared before, it means the police do not think all sharing is harmful," says Hessick.

The counterargument, of course, is law enforcement commits illegal acts for the greater good. But the argument is somewhat hollow when child porn convictions come with restitution orders based on the number of images shared. Eleven months running a child porn site seems like overkill, especially when the two principal members were already in custody by the time investigators took over.

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Filed Under: australia, dark web