A recent tweet by NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden reminds us that the CIA is not the only agency employing highly sophisticated hacking tools.

We know from the Vault 7 Wikileaks release that the CIA has lost control over their cyber weapons arsenal. They may have directly or indirectly supplied the FBI with these types of capabilities.

The idea that the FBI would have significant evidence on purveyors of child porn, which they had been building a case against on the Dark Web, and drop the charges in order to protect their secret hacking tool says a lot about the priorities of the alphabet agencies in general. They're more concerned with concealing their abilities in the shadows than bringing child abusers to justice.

It makes one wonder about other organizations who claim to be combating human trafficking and child sexual exploitation such as THORN.

In his testimony to Senate Select Committee on Human Trafficking the CEO of THORN, Ashton Kutcher, exalted the capabilities of THORN's proprietary software on several occasions. Spotlight and Solace are the names of two anti-human trafficking software programs developed by THORN. Kutcher wouldn't go into detail about the secret software but promised they were powerful and flexible tools.

But what if THORN found themselves in a similar situation in support of the DHS, FBI or CIA? What then? If forced to give up some of their proprietary secrets in order to ensure a conviction, would they also choose to drop the case to protect their business? Kutcher described himself as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I think it's safe to assume that protecting the financial interests of the organization is the first priority.

It Wasn’t For Lack of Evidence

Edward Snowden's tweet referenced a Wired article which described how the FBI dropped the case rather than expose their methods.

The Department of Justice filed a motion in Washington State federal court on Friday to dismiss its indictment against a child porn site. It wasn’t for lack of evidence; it was because the FBI didn’t want to disclose details of a hacking tool to the defense as part of discovery. Evidence in United States v. Jay Michaud hinged at least in part on information federal investigators had gathered by exploiting a vulnerability in the Tor anonymity network.

“Because the government remains unwilling to disclose certain discovery related to the FBI’s deployment of a ‘Network Investigative Technique’ (‘NIT’) as part of its investigation into the Playpen child pornography site, the government has no choice but to seek dismissal of the indictment,” federal prosecutor Annette Hayes wrote in the court filing on Friday. She noted that the DoJ’s work to resist disclosing the NIT was part of “an effort to balance the many competing interests that are at play when sensitive law enforcement technology becomes the subject of a request for criminal discovery.”

In other words, the feds are letting an alleged child pornographer free so that officials can potentially catch other dark-web using criminals in the future.

Source: Wired

After FBI Take Over Child Porn Site Ran 'Much Better'

Let's put this in context. Playpen is the child porn site that the FBI had taken over on the Dark Web in 2015. Instead of shutting it down, they maintained and operated the site in order to catch more criminals. Just one problem, the FBI actually improved the service and dramatically increased the amount of web traffic to Playpen.

"The FBI distributed child pornography to viewers and downloaders worldwide for nearly two weeks, until at least March 4, 2015, even working to improve the performance of the website beyond its original capability," Peter Adolf, an assistant federal defender in the Western District of North Carolina, writes in a motion to have his client's indictment thrown out.

"As a result, the number of visitors to Playpen while it was under Government control [increased] from an average of 11,000 weekly visitors to approximately 50,000 per week. During those two weeks, the website's membership grew by over 30%, the number of unique weekly visitors to the site more than quadrupled, and approximately 200 videos, 9,000 images, and 13,000 links to child pornography were posted on the site," he continues.

Source: Motherboard/Vice

All together, the FBI took over a child porn site, increased it's efficiency, amassed large amounts of data on the sites users and then walked away from the case in order to be able to use their secret hacking tool in the future to catch more child pornographers. By this logic, the FBI will repeat this same pattern in perpetuity: hack larger child porn site, increase efficiency, create more traffic, help proliferate child porn, and drop case to keep secrets.