The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) decision to host a child pornography site in 2015 in an effort to catch users of the site has backfired, with a judge ruling that a warrant used in the operation was invalid.

If you’ve missed the story previously, the FBI seized “Playpen”, a site described as one of the internet’s largest child pornography sites with 215,000 registered users in February 2015, but instead of closing the site it decided to keep it running on its own servers in an effort to identify and prosecute its users.

As part of the sting, the FBI obtained a warrant to use a network investigative technique (NIT), that is the ability to install tracking malware on the computers of those visiting the site to allow them to identify who the visitors were even though they were connecting to the site over the otherwise anonymous Tor network.

But in the first prosecution from the investigation to come before a court, it has now been found that the warrant issued for the NIT was not valid, meaning that the identification evidence obtained by the FBI in all 137 cases currently listed for court cannot be used.

According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge William Young ruled that a Virginia-based Magistrate Judge had no jurisdiction to issue a search warrant used to justify gathering evidence, as a U.S. Magistrate Judge only has the jurisdiction to authorize warrants in his local area and that collecting evidence outside of that area can only be done with the authorization of a District Judge.

“It follows that the resulting search was conducted as though there were no warrant at all,” Young wrote. “Since warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable, and the good-faith exception is inapplicable, the evidence must be excluded.”

To make matters worse for the FBI, Judge Young also pointed out that the Federal Judges who could have properly authorized the warrant were immediately available to do so.

“The magistrate judge who issued this warrant sits primarily in Alexandria, Virginia,” Judge Young added. “Four district judges and three senior judges sit routinely in that courthouse.”

Epic fail

The ruling puts in doubt nearly every single case the FBI is pursuing following the investigation, with the exception of those who were caught within Virginia, the jurisdiction of the Magistrate Judge.

Subsequent evidence obtained as a result of the NIT’s is also now in doubt as the argument will be that the FBI was only able to identify the people through the use of an illegal method, so even those who were in possession of child pornography on top of being caught viewing the site in question, could have their cases thrown out.

It was beyond dubious of the FBI to host a child pornography site to begin with; we said previously that “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.” We now know tax dollars were hosting a child porn site that may actually result in zero successful prosecutions at all.

The FBI should hang its head in shame over this entire sordid affair, and you can only hope that someone higher up in Government launches an investigation into it all.

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