To reveal Tor hack or drop child porn charges?

The US Department of Justice has asked a court to drop a case against a child pornography website. The reason? The department refuses to reveal details of a hack used to identify visitors.

According to ZDNet, legal representatives for the Justice Department are requesting that charges be dropped in the case against dark web child porn site Playpen.

“The government must now choose between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of its indictment. Disclosure is not currently an option,” read an excerpt of the filing, according to the publication. The team is however calling for the case to be reopened when the hack is declassified.

The case came after a Washington state school administrator was arrested in 2015 for viewing pictures of child porn on Playpen via the Tor browser. Authorities found that the server was hosted in the USA, then proceeded to operate the site for two more weeks in order to identify visitors.

Should the government be forced to reveal a Tor hack that uncovered viewers of child porn?

Authorities used a mysterious hacking tool to “deanonymise” users of the Tor browser, allowing IP addresses and other details to be uncovered.

The government has however refused to reveal the source code for the hack, leading a judge to toss out the evidence in question.

The saga has also seen Mozilla make a legal filing to reveal the hack’s details, as Tor shares much of the same code as Firefox.

“At this point, no one (including us) outside the government knows what vulnerability was exploited and whether it resides in any of our code base. The judge in this case ordered the government to disclose the vulnerability to the defense team but not to any of the entities that could actually fix the vulnerability,” read an excerpt of Mozilla’s blog post.

A ruling is expected “in the coming weeks”.