“It’s not like they’re blasting it out to the world.” “These are places where people know exactly what they’re getting when they arrive,” said James Marsh, who represents some of the children depicted in some of the most widely-circulated images. The FBI hacks have drawn repeated – though so far unsuccessful – legal challenges, largely centered on the search warrants agents obtained before agents cracked the computer network.īut they have also prompted a backlash of a different kind. In a court filing, a lawyer for one of the men arrested after the FBI sting charged that “what the government did in this case is comparable to flooding a neighborhood with heroin in the hope of snatching an assortment of low-level drug users.” The defense lawyer, Colin Fieman, asked a federal judge to throw out child pornography charges against his client, former middle school teacher Jay Michaud. A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments on that request Friday.įederal agents first noticed Playpen not long after it went online in August, 2014. The site was buried in what is often called the “dark web,” a part of the internet that is accessible to the public only through Tor, network software that bounces users’ internet traffic from one computer to another to make it largely untraceable.īy March of last year, the FBI said, Playpen had grown to become “the largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world,” the Justice Department said in a court filing. FBI agents tracked the site to computer servers in North Carolina, and in February seized the site and quietly moved it to its own facility in Newington, Va. During that time, federal prosecutors told defense lawyers that the site included more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children. Some of those could be downloaded directly from the government’s computers others were available through links to other hard-to-find locations on the web, Fieman said. One section of the site was labeled “toddlers,” according to court records.

Veronika babko toy