Out of context this sounds much worse than it is - the FBI forcefully took control of a hosting network that included 23 child-porn service sites. They then used it as a platform to serve malware to the visitors of the sites. Within a month, they shut down the websites.

>FBI Special Agent Jeff Tarpinian admitted in court that the agency “relocated two servers to an FBI facility here in Omaha and we continued to let those child pornography run"

http://disinfo.com/2016/01/why-did-the-fbi-operate-a-child-p...

In context, it sounds even harder to justify.

This article is about Freedom Hosting, that link is talking about Operation Pacifier. Those are two completely different operations that took places years apart, by different agents.

It seems that was a very slippery slope then.

If the FBI seized a store that sold illegal drugs, and kept operating the stores and selling illegal drugs for a month afterwards, would that be considered OK? I'm not getting hugely up in arms about this, but it doesn't seem right.

What if it were controlling a kingpin for a month in order to identify multiple lower levels of distributors and dealers? I believe that consumers of child pornography are considered likely participants in the further trade of material and creators of more content than the typical drug user is.

It seems to me that allowing a criminal to continue committing crimes is different from taking ownership of a server and continuing to operate it. The criminal has agency, while the server does not. But it's not entirely clear cut, for sure.

Correct me if I am wrong but isn't that basically what they did with Sabu?

That's actually reasonably close to what happened in the ATF's Operation Fast & Furious. They identified gun shops that they believed would sell to gun runners without asking questions, watched the criminals buy guns, and then allowed the guns to be dispersed amongst criminals on both sides of the border without making any meaningful attempts to keep track of the guns.

I mean, they do this - it's not uncommon to bust a drug dealer, and then allow them to continue operating as an informant so they can monitor their activities.

Yeah, this shit happens all the time. How do you people think law enforcement operates against criminal networks? Infiltrate, quietly gather evidence, then prosecute. The "gather evidence" portion often involves allowing people to do incriminating things, especially since, you know, being about to do an illegal thing isn't illegal (usually).

The question is whether this is how we want law enforcement to operate in our society.

And in the process of answering that question we should probably ask, "is it working?"

Mmmm yep. I want our law enforcement to have the ability to find and prosecute people at levels of criminality higher than selling loose cigarettes on the street.

Like seriously? Do you really think the absolute lowest hanging fruit is valuable, fair, or effective for justice to focus on?

No, I don't think that. Maybe I was ambiguous. My question was whether we want law enforcement to become purveyors of illegal material in order to prosecute people seeking that material. That seems a little circular to me.

And since the analogy was dealing with illegal drugs I was wondering whether these tactics are in fact more effective than just prosecuting at the level of "selling loose cigarettes".

You might want to read beyond the clickbait headline.

"“I would refer you to public documents on the Playpen investigation, in which we seized and operated a darkweb child pornography site for a period of less than two weeks,”

That reads to me like yes, they were running the fully operational CP sites and allowing it to continue to serve up CP.

The ends do not justify the means.

ANd nobody has raised the question of how this can actually be done legally - under current law is there a way to make the serving up of CP content a sufficiently grey area that it's permissible to do with only judicial approval?

If not, seems to me the individuals managing the site for the window of federal operations have the potential to be in a whole mess of trouble.

If so, that seems a thing that should be fixed.