The FBI ran nearly half of all known dark web child pornography sites

(Image credit: Odd Andersen/Getty Images)

last updated 14 November 2016

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union reveal the FBI took over and operated 23 child pornography websites out of a government facility in an attempt to catch site users.

Though it was previously known the FBI operated one such site for 13 days before closing it down, using the website to install tracking malware on visitors' computers, the new documents show the scale of the project was much larger, comprising about half of all dark web child pornography sites.

More than 100 cases have been prosecuted in connection to the first site the FBI was known to operate, and in several of those trials judges have deemed evidence collected in this manner inadmissible. "The courts have been divided in their rulings on whether the FBI went too far," notes The Seattle Times in a report on one such case, "and prosecutors and defense lawyers say the case is almost certainly headed to the U.S. Supreme Court."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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