The government being wary of revealing their trade secrets has asked the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) to dismiss a lawsuit against the man accused of accessing the dark web child porn website PlayPen. And the federal court has complied with their request and now dismissed all charges so as protect the technological means, i.e Tor browser hack, used to locate the suspect.
According to an official court filing posted in the Washington state on Friday, the government is unwilling to disclose the exploit used to carry out the hacks. This exploit has been referred to as “network investigative technique” and allows investigators to gain access to real IP addresses of those even using the secure Tor browser. Since there has been no disclosure of this technique, security researchers believe that the govt deploys malware programs to access an individual’s system.
Further, Annette Hayes, a federal prosecutor states that the government has no choice but to seek dismissal this time around. But, the prosecutor is not letting this case lay to rest as the government plans to pick it back up once they can share the details of their method in the court. Talking about the same in an official filing, she said,
The government must now choose between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of its indictment. Disclosure is not currently an option.
Dismissal without prejudice leaves open the possibility that the government could bring new charges should there come a time within the statute of limitations when and the government be in a position to provide the requested discovery.
The said lawsuit that we’re talking about revolves around Jay Michaud, a school administrator from Vancouver. He was arrested back in July 2015 for accessing over 100 of threads with pornographic images/videos of children on PlayPen through Tor browser. Post his arrest, the authorities used the aforementioned tool to locate the server (hosted in U.S itself) and seize control over the same. They had the server running for another two weeks to catch other individuals visiting the website, which number now amounts to 200.
The government might have dragged all the culprits to court but failing to produce evidence in the form of the complete source code of the exploit has had its repercussions. The judge has tossed out the said evidence, which would’ve played a significant role in Michaud’s prosecution. Even Mozilla, whose source code has been used to build Tor, has asked the feds to privately reveal the details of the hack. The non-profit said that it could fix the zero-day vulnerability that it thinks would affect the security of “hundreds of millions of users.” But, the government has since been non-compliant and the code for their exploit remains classified for the time being.
