US law enforcement is known for entrapment tactics, and the secrecy around a recent terrorism case is suspicious.<\/p>\n
A high-level conspiracy of silence surrounding a US terrorism prosecution raises serious questions over whether the FBI possesses technological means to bypass dark web user anonymity, or alternatively manages extremist group recruitment sites in secret, in order to entrap unsuspecting visitors.
\nUS citizen Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari was\u00a0charged\u00a0in May 2020 with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. He came to the attention of the FBI due to a series of visits he made to a dark web site, which hosts\u00a0\u201cunofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS\u201d\u00a0in May 2019.
\nThe Bureau pinpointed specific pages of the site Al-Azhari perused including sections on making donations, ISIS media assets, photos and videos, and stories of military operations allegedly conducted by ISIS fighters in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria. These actions were linked to him directly by uncovering his IP address, and therefore his identity and location.
\nAl-Azhari accessed the site via the TOR browser, which theoretically provides anonymity to users, and makes it difficult if not impossible for a site\u2019s owner or external prying eyes to track visitor IPs. A recent\u00a0court filing\u00a0by Al-Azhari\u2019s lawyers reveals that\u2019s precisely what the FBI did though and exactly how they achieved this is being withheld by government decree.
\n\u201c[Using TOR] onion-like layers of additional IP addresses prevent the true IP address of the user from being visible like it would typically be on a clear-web site,\u201d\u00a0the filing states.\u00a0\u201cHowever, as the government\u2019s complaint affidavit indicates, the government was able to bypass TOR\u2019s protections to identify the IP address of the visitor to the ISIS website. In discovery, the government has declined to provide any information related to its TOR operation.\u201d
\nAl-Azhari\u2019s legal team attempted to compel the US government to disclose the method by which the FBI unearthed his IP address, but authorities without explanation requested the prosecuting Court treat their formal request as a\u00a0\u201chighly sensitive document.\u201d\u00a0This is a file containing\u00a0\u201csensitive or confidential information that may be of interest to the intelligence service of a hostile foreign government and whose use or disclosure by a hostile foreign government would likely cause significant harm.\u201d
\nWhile the filing records that\u00a0\u201cfew documents\u201d\u00a0filed in US courts ever qualify as\u00a0\u201chighly sensitive,\u201d\u00a0the government\u2019s request was granted, again without any explanation. However, the filing hints at a possible explanation chanced upon by Al-Azhari\u2019s lawyers.
\nIn researching how to legally compel the government to release details of their client\u2019s identification, they discovered\u00a0\u201cat least two federal cases\u201d\u00a0in which authorities blocked disclosure of similar information on the grounds\u00a0\u201cnetwork investigative techniques\u201d\u00a0– a euphemism for hacking – were used by investigators.
\nThe filing suggests these techniques might have been one of the ways in which the FBI\u00a0\u201cmay have bypassed TOR\u2019s protections in the operation,\u201d\u00a0and determined Al-Azhari\u2019s IP address. The FBI\u2019s use of\u00a0\u201cnetwork investigative techniques\u201d\u00a0is well-known and openly admitted. Yet, the\u00a0\u201chighly sensitive document\u201d\u00a0designation is, the lawyers acknowledge, only employed\u00a0\u201cwhen necessary to protect highly classified or highly confidential information.\u201d
\nThe filing suggests this means the FBI is attempting to classify publicly-available information as\u00a0\u201ctop secret\u201d, but another interpretation is the FBI could be actively running the website Al-Azhari visited for the purposes of entrapment. How the FBI uses\u00a0\u201cnetwork investigative techniques\u201d\u00a0was revealed in a 2016\u00a0affidavit, related to an extraordinary Bureau operation that ensnared the users of Playpen, then one of the largest child porn sites on the dark web.
\nA year earlier, the FBI seized Playpen\u2019s servers, and indicted its founder and owner, but kept the site operating from government servers rather than closing it, installing tracking viruses on the computer of each and every visitor. Then, with just one search warrant, they were able to hand over the locations of Playpen\u2019s users across the US, leading to their mass arrest.
\nWhile it only remained open for two weeks after the FBI\u2019s takeover, it\u2019s\u00a0estimated\u00a0the Bureau distributed over one million images of child abuse during this time, and the affidavit indicates Playpen was just one of 23 child porn sites where it had the ability to identify users. Cybersecurity researchers\u00a0believe\u00a0it to be\u00a0\u201ca pretty reasonable assumption\u201d\u00a0that this figure meant the FBI was running around half of the dark web\u2019s child porn sites at the time.
\nThis led University of Kansas law scholar Corey Rayburn Yung to\u00a0argue\u00a0the FBI had\u00a0\u201cactively participated in the revictimization of those depicted in child pornography,\u201dand the operation was\u00a0\u201cimmoral and inexcusable,\u201d\u00a0particularly given that there was no control over whether the material was then sold and\/or shared again once downloaded. While no one at the Bureau was ever penalized, let alone prosecuted, for the ruse, it created a large number of prosecutorial issues in other ways for the Department of Justice.
\nWhile the FBI\u00a0accumulated\u00a01,300 separate IP addresses through its management of Playpen, less than 100 cases actually made it to court. Judges in several US states ruled the operation was absolutely illegal, and the evidence gathered on suspects was inadmissible. In one successful trial, despite the defendant being convicted of grave crimes, the presiding justice\u00a0condemned\u00a0the Bureau\u2019s\u00a0\u201coutrageous\u201d\u00a0tactic of using\u00a0\u201cchild victims as bait.\u201d
\nTo say the least, the FBI would have every interest in concealing its deployment of the same highly controversial and likely criminal strategy from the public, its targets, and their legal teams to catch terror suspects. Alternatively, it could be the case that the Bureau has developed an entirely new technology for deanonymizing dark web users it does not want the world to know about.
\nIn June 2021, the FBI achieved perhaps the biggest, most elaborate and successful\u00a0sting\u00a0in its history, which resulted in over 500 arrests all over the globe. The Bureau pulled off this coup by setting up a front company, ANOM, which sold encrypted devices that were marketed to criminals as unbreakable by any law enforcement entity or security or intelligence agency.
\nOver 12,000 ANOM devices were sold to over 300 criminal syndicates operating in over 100 countries. Little did the users know that every message they sent and received was stored, making a very simple matter of tracking the movements and activities of, and building cases against, major drug traffickers and mafia clans.
\nThis is particularly relevant given that European and North American sanctions on Russia have forced millions of people all over the world to turn to the dark web to use the internet as normal, and many of the tools being promoted to people to circumvent these measures in the mainstream, such as Psiphon VPN, are quietly\u00a0funded\u00a0by the US intelligence community, and only provide users privacy from their own governments.<\/p>\n
Rt<\/p>\n
Tags\uff1aFBI, Trap, Recruitment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US law enforcement is known for entrapment tactics, and the secrecy around a recent terrorism case is suspicious. A high-level conspiracy of silence surrounding a US terrorism prosecution raises serious questions over whether the FBI possesses technological means to bypass dark web user anonymity, or alternatively manages extremist group recruitment sites in secret, in order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":5103,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1154],"tags":[2191,419,2192],"class_list":["post-5102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-dark","tag-fbi","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5102"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9748,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5102\/revisions\/9748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}