Justice US releases suspect to keep Tor hack source code secret

The US government has withdrawn a case against a suspect in the child pornography case surrounding the Tor site Playpen. The case requires the government to provide information about a Tor hack, which was used to identify suspects.

In the case, known as United States v. Jay Michaud, a prosecutor explained that “the government must now choose between disclosing classified information and withdrawing its case.” The judiciary would consider keeping the hack a secret more important than prosecuting this suspect. The prosecutor can resubmit the case if the hack used is no longer secret. According to Ars Technica, this case is one of 135 pending cases against suspects in the Playpen case.

In a large number of cases, suspects have confessed, as opposed to a small number of charges that have been dropped. The investigation into the child pornography site Playpen continued in 2015, with the FBI continuing to temporarily host the service with its own servers to identify suspects. The investigative service used a ‘network investigative technique’ to carry out the identification. The FBI has always refused to make the method public. When a judge issued a disclosure order, the government decided to designate the method as classified information.

Mozilla develops the Firefox browser, which forms the basis of the Tor browser, and released a patch in December for a vulnerability that could be used to expose Tor users. It is not clear whether this is the same vulnerability as the one used by the FBI in the Playpen operation.