Further Reading Cybersecurity official uses Tor but still gets caught with child porn

On Monday, a federal judge in Nebraska sentenced the former acting director of cybersecurity for the US Department of Health and Human Services to 25 years in prison on child porn charges.

Timothy DeFoggi, who was convicted back in August 2014, is the sixth person to be convicted in relations to a Nebraska-based child porn Tor-enable website known as PedoBook. That site’s administrator, Aaron McGrath, was sentenced to 20 years last year by the same judge. McGrath famously did not have an administrator password, a mistake that federal investigators were easily able to make use of.

DeFoggi's attorneys did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment, but he was almost certainly unmasked via an FBI-created malware exploit designed to expose him and other PedoBook users.

"Today's sentence and the others imposed earlier demonstrate that those who exploit children will be aggressively pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Deborah Gilg, the United States Attorney for the District of Nebraska, said in a statement on Monday. "Those who think they are acting anonymously on the Internet will be found and held accountable."

Last month, DeFoggi filed a motion for a new trial, which was denied.

At trial according to Gilg's statement, federal prosecutors presented evidence illustrating that DeFoggi "had accessed child pornography, solicited child pornography from other members, and exchanged private messages with other members where he expressed an interest in the violent rape and murder of children.”

UPDATE Tuesday 10:32am CT: Stu Dornan, DeFoggi's lawyer, wrote to Ars, saying that his client "will be appealing the conviction and sentence and steadfastly maintains his innocence."