An ex-US government cyber security chief has been convicted on three child porn charges after being snared by a controversial FBI operation designed to unmask criminals using the Tor platform.
Timothy DeFoggi, 56, was the former acting head of cyber security at the US Department of Health and Human Services.
He was convicted by a federal jury in Nebraska on Tuesday of: “engaging in a child exploitation enterprise, conspiracy to advertise and distribute child pornography, and accessing a computer with intent to view child pornography in connection with his membership in a child pornography website.”
As such, DeFoggi becomes the sixth such user of child porn sites caught by Operation Torpedo, an FBI initiative begun in 2012 but which was only recently revealed.
That operation began when Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) agents discovered a Tor site called Pedoboard, hosted in Nebraska, according to a Wired report earlier this month.
The FBI then monitored the site and two others run by owner Aaron McGrath for a year, eventually arresting him and then continuing to operate them for weeks afterwards from an FBI office in Omaha, all the while accumulating evidence and rooting out the IP addresses of visitors to the sites.
Eventually they were completely shut down and 25 suspects arrested, 14 of whom faced trial.
One of those was DeFoggi, who not only exchanged and accessed child porn but also “even suggested meeting one member in person to fulfill their mutual fantasies to violently rape and murder children,” according to the Justice Department.
However, Operation Torpedo has hit controversy, after it was revealed that the Feds effectively installed back-doors on the monitored pedophile sites to allow them to identify the IP addresses, MAC addresses and Windows hostnames of any visitors.
Not only that, but it was claimed that the FBI deliberately concealed its use of these so-called “network investigative techniques” beyond the 30-day period previously agreed by a judge.
Others argued that the Bureau may have misled the judge into giving the operation the green light by failing to use words like “malware” and “exploit” when it applied for permission to effect Operation Torpedo.