In an interesting case that blurs the line between doing what’s right and wrong, it has been disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) actually operated a child porn site in 2015 in an attempt to track down users who trade in kiddie porn.

Let that sink in for a moment: a taxpayer funded Government agency ran, operated, and hosted a child porn site.

According to USA Today, the site, called “Playpen” and described as one of the internet’s largest child pornography sites with 215,000 registered users, was seized following an investigation by FBI agents in February 2015.

At that point, according to court filings from the Department of Justice, a decision was made that the FBI would continue to operate the site, which at the time included links to more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including more than 9,000 files that users could download directly.

That last part is important: the FBI was not only hosting over 9,000 child pornography files, but allowing people to download them with some of the images described in court filings involving “children barely old enough for kindergarten.”

The paper notes that the decision by the FBI to host a child porn site is a significant departure from previous practices, where the agency immediately moved to close these sites down as the Justice Department believes that children depicted in these images and videos are harmed each time they are viewed and that their distribution may cause them to be copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet.

Yes: the FBI not only facilitated the viewing of child pornography by hosting it, but also helped distribute it to other sites by allowing the sick deviants who view this stuff the ability to copy and share what they downloaded from Government servers.

Honey trap

The FBI claims in its defense that running the child porn site was the only way they could capture people accessing the site.

“We had a window of opportunity to get into one of the darkest places on Earth, and not a lot of other options except to not do it,” former senior FBI official Ron Hosko told the paper. “There was no other way we could identify as many players.”

While one sick deviant off the street is definitely a bonus, the question then becomes as to whether the benefit of hosting the site, even for a short period of time, outweighed the consequences of further distributing the material.

The bad news for the FBI is the numbers don’t stack up well.

According to court documents, 100,000 Playpen registered users visited the site while it was under the FBI’s control, with each presumably downloading multiple images and videos, meaning that potentially the Federal Government itself distributed perhaps as many as several million child porn images.

In return, the Justice Department claims to have only found the true IP address of 1,300 of them, or 1.3 percent, with only 137 (or 0.0014 percent) being charged with a crime.

While it would be unrealistic to expect that the FBI would be able to capture all of the users, particularly as they cloak their identities over the TOR network, 0.0014 percent of users facing charges at the cost of spreading millions of kiddie porn image across the Dark Web?

Although you can understand what the FBI was trying to achieve, it’s way too high a price to pay for the capture and prosecution of a small few.

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

Image credit: degu_andre/Flickr/CC by 2.0