Tor-Hidden Child Sex Abuse Site Administrator Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison

Playpen users were targeted with FBI hacking techniques

CYRUS FARIVAR (US) 

A federal judge in North Carolina has sentenced Michael Fluckiger, a co-administrator of a notorious Tor-hidden child porn site, to 20 years in prison.

I don't think 20 years is anywhere near long enough for these guys. They are not only flat-out evil, but they facilitate evil by hundreds of thousands of others at the expense of children. These three perverts should never be allowed to roam free ever again.

Fluckiger pleaded guilty to running Playpen in December 2015, after being indicted in March 2015. His two fellow admins, David Lynn Browning, of Kentucky, and Steven Chase, of Florida, who were also prosecuted as part of the same case and also have pleaded guilty, have not yet been sentenced.

According to prosecutors, the three men who ran the website are among the over 200 Playpen-related prosecutions nationwide. In order to identify many of the site’s users who were prosecuted, the FBI had to seize and operate the site for 13 days.

While doing so, the FBI deployed a “network investigative technique,” or NIT, which many researchers have described as malware, to force the user’s Tor browser to cough up a true IP address. With that in hand, investigators filed subpoenas with the relevant ISPs, which in turn revealed their true names and billing addresses.

The effort to take down Playpen has raised questions about proper limits on the government’s ability to hack criminal suspects. A small handful of alleged Playpen users have successfully challenged the single warrant used to deploy the NIT against them.

As Vice Motherboard first reported in March 2016, Browning was first identified by a foreign law enforcement agency as part of an investigation into yet another child porn website. His IP address was exposed when those overseas cops provided him a “hyperlink to a streaming video.” The file had been configured to go around his Tor browser, which then exposed his true IP. After realizing it was an American IP address, the foreign agency handed it over to the FBI.

The Justice Department said in a Thursday statement:

According to admissions made in connection with the plea, Fluckiger acted as the co-administrator of a highly-sophisticated global enterprise dedicated to the sexual exploitation of children, organized via a members-only website that operated on the Tor anonymity network, through which he and more than 150,000 other members authored and viewed tens of thousands of postings relating to sexual abuse of children as young as infants and toddlers.

The government also noted that due to the investigation, “at least 48 alleged hands-on abusers have been prosecuted and 49 American children who were subjected to sexual abuse have been successfully identified or rescued.”