Kik associate general counsel Ryan Tremblay, in a statement, said Kik wasn’t privy to law enforcement’s undercover investigations and had no way of knowing if specific accounts were being used by officers. It subsequently promised to invest more in cleaning up its platform. The company repeatedly failed to delete profiles of convicted sex offenders. The report also detailed child exploitation content was being shared across the app and discovered cases where undercover officers were actively encouraging suspects to communicate on Kik. In 2017, a Forbes investigation found that fake profiles posing as 14-year-olds were harassed by men within minutes of signing up. The Hansen sting also raises questions for Kik, which has been plagued by problems with child exploitation. Kik and Instagram: platforms rife with abuse? “But you’d need some very serious permissions and approvals from above to be able to keep that stuff going.” that the outcome would justify some of the downsides. “I’d assume this would be assessed by police. “Every situation needs to be assessed,” Signy Arnason, associate executive director at the Canadian Center for Child Protection, told Forbes. Tracking a group called “Boy Links Only! Send on Entry or be Kicked” between April and May 2017, the FBI agent picked up on one user: “no_limits_bmx.” The user had been part of the group during a period in which members had shared “thousands of images/videos of child pornography.” But no charges have been filed against that user.Įven some advocates for the rights of child exploitation victims believe that sometimes the ugliness is justified when abusers are apprehended. The only evidence of a follow-up investigation was in the same search warrant that detailed the undercover operation. The lawyer for Hansen, who remains in jail in Englewood prison in Colorado, declined to comment. It’s unclear how many people, if any, are being investigated because of the undercover use of Hansen’s accounts. Shutting Playpen down immediately “might have ended child pornography trafficking on Playpen, but it would have come at a great cost: squandering any hope of identifying and apprehending the offenders responsible for engaging in hands-on exploitation as well as identifying and prosecuting those users,” the Justice Department wrote. Justifying the operation, the government said more than 200 prosecutions were subsequently launched and 49 American children rescued.įBI's Playpen investigation led to 350 U.S. An additional 13,000 links to child pornography were posted during the FBI’s administration of the site. By its own admission, the FBI said 9,000 images and 200 videos were made available by Playpen users while it operated the site from February 20 to March 4, 2015. But over that fortnight, the website’s performance improved and membership increased 30%, according to counsel for an administrator of Playpen, Steven Chase, who was eventually sentenced to 30 years for six counts related to the sharing and advertisement of child abuse content.
For two weeks, police launched malicious code at visitors that would attempt to uncloak their IP address and, subsequently, their identity.
The site was hosted on Tor, widely known as the dark Web, where users’ identities are obscured by layers of encryption. The most controversial facilitation of child pornography occurred in February 2015, when the Department of Justice seized and ran Playpen.
( Forbes could not find court documents showing how the police benefitted from that access). In 2008, investigators took control of a suspect’s Yahoo account, and in 2009, the FBI acquired access to a real user account on a peer-to-peer file-sharing service. In two previous public cases, both looking into child abuse material crimes, police presented suspects with “consent to assume online identity” forms. The government, though, believes taking control of suspects’ online personas is sometimes worth it. “Abused children should not be used as bait.”
government on child exploitation and internet safety. Forbesĭistributing images of children being sexually abused violates their privacy and puts them at risk of being harmed again, said John Carr, a consultant who worked for Microsoft and the U.K. that agent continued to operate the groups of the suspect and further spread child pornography. An FBI search warrant shows how an agent assumed the online identity of a pedophile.