A federal judge ruled today that the FBI did not obtain the proper warrant before hacking a child porn website and that the evidence it collected against one of the defendants, Alex Levin, must be suppressed.
The case centers on a child porn site called Playpen, which was hosted on a hidden Tor service intended to conceal users’ identities. The FBI seized the site’s server in February of last year, but instead of shutting it down, the agency continued to run the site on its own server for several weeks. During that period, the FBI implemented its own hacking tool, referred to as a network investigative technique (NIT), to collect the IP addresses of visitors to the site. The FBI is thought to have obtained thousands of IP addresses during the investigation.
