[tor-talk] Richard Chirgwin @ theregister.co.uk: "Judge orders FBI to reveal whether White House launched 'Tor pedo' torpedo exploits"

Zenaan Harkness zen at freedbms.net
Wed Oct 26 02:04:45 PDT 2016


On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 05:04:57PM -0400, krishna e bera wrote:
> On 25/10/16 01:55 PM, tortalk at arcor.de wrote:
> >http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/10/25/judge_orders_fbi_to_reveal_whether_exploits_were_okayed_by_white_house/
> >"The case is one of several the Feds are pursuing against more than
> >100 alleged users of the child sex abuse material exchange network
> >called the Playpen. The prosecutions have become test grounds over
> >investigators' use of hacking tools to unmask Tor users – Playpen
> >was hidden in the Tor network and agents injected tracking software
> >into Playpen visitors' browsers to identify users.
> >
> >...
> >
> >The Playpen investigation also sparked last year's controversy over
> >Carnegie-Mellon University's part. It was accused of revealing
> >de-anonymisation research to the FBI in 2014, and last November said
> >it wasn't paid for the research, but rather, served with a subpoena."
> 
> Perhaps our new Board member from CMU can provide more details, e.g. a copy
> of the subpoena and their response.

That's anyway an effective way to create an faux "arms-length"
appearance - fund a particular study (e.g. HS identification), and
subsequently serve a court ordered subpoena upon the university study
once it's clear they have data you can use (for parallel construction or
otherwise).

Can such faux arms-length "plausible deniability" on the part of the
university, be restructured into a process that is subpoena proof?


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