Unidentified foreign law enforcement agency?
Thumbs up to the FBI, good to get this guy - and it's very worrying that there are 100,000+ others on the same network, all uploading 'fresh' material. That is seriously bad.
BUT... what's this about an 'unidentified foreign law enforcement agency' that was 'acting within its national laws'? Perhaps a country where the national laws say you can attach electrodes to someone's willy until he provides his passwords? Or beat him senseless, or pretend to drown him? A country which has no restrictions on government monitoring of communications (e.g. May-land)?
There are some very difficult moral issues with all this - the sick scum who abuse children need to be stopped, but does the end ever justify the means? Can a group that actively runs a kiddie-porn website be 'enforcing the law'? Would we allow their agents to infiltrate a trrrst organisation and help to detonate a bomb that kills people, in the hope that they can identify other members of the group? I don't think so. Once they have control of a dodgy site surely their legal duty is to shut it down at once. If we say they can keep running it as a honeypot how long should they do it? Days? Weeks? Years? Or perhaps they should build their own website from scratch, or even their own darknet setup - kiddie-pr0n, hard drugs, assassination all thanks to your local friendly law-enforcement agency.. An extreme case, yes, but the point is, where do we draw the line? I'm not happy with the police distributing kiddie-pr0n, whatever the reason.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
