Raising new questions about how far law enforcement should go to catch criminals, police in Queensland, Australia, ran a child pornography site on the dark web for nearly a year as a “honey trap” to capture child pornographers and those who view the material.

First exposed by a newspaper in Norway, then subsequently picked up by The Guardian Saturday, Taskforce Argos, a dedicated unit within the Queensland Police Service, ran a child pornography site by the name of “Childs Play” after taking control of the site in October 2016. Before closing the site in September, police officers uploaded and shared child pornography, including extreme child abuse and rape material.

The site is said to have 1 million registered users at the time it was eventually taken offline, with between 3,000 to 4,000 active users sharing material and about 100 “producers” filming the rape of children and shared videos and imagery of the abuse on the site.

Interestingly, and immediately drawing attention to the morality involved with running a child porn site to catch child porn users and makers, the site was initially seized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which subsequently handed over control of the site to the QPS. Queensland police do not have legal restrictions on undertaking illegal activities to catch criminals, whereas such an undertaking is illegal in the United States barring special permission.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation similarly ran a child porn site in 2015 to capture those viewing and manufacturing child pornography after seeking dispensation from the Department of Justice, but the results following the investigation turned into a complete shambles. In April 2016, a judge ruled that all evidence collected during the time the FBI ran the site was invalid because of an incorrect warrant, while a ruling in September 2016 found that malware used by the FBI to gather evidence about site users was unconstitutional because the bureau had failed to gain a search warrant to use it.

It’s not clear at this stage how successful the QPS operation was. According to the original Norwegian report, the task force is now in the process of sending cases to police around the world for prosecution covering between 60 to 90 people, while police in an unnamed country were reported to have a list of nearly 900 to be arrested. In Canada, more than a dozen children are claimed to have been rescued thanks to the investigation.

The question remains, as it did when the activities of the FBI came to light, whether law enforcement is justified in running a child porn site and engaging in some of the most insidious behavior possible as a means to capture others doing so. After all, the distribution of even one child porn image is regarded to cause further damage to the victim. And in this case, QPS distributed perhaps as many as hundreds of thousands of these images and videos in the pursuit of justice.

Photo: QPS/YouTube