The Department of Justice recently acknowledged in court filings that the FBI had been running the website, known as “Playpen”, as part of a largely secret operation on the dark web. On February 20, 2015, instead of shutting down the website that they had seized, the FBI continued to run it until May 4 and infect users with software that revealed their identities.
The website had more than 215,000 registered users, and it had links to more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children, including 9,000 files that could be downloaded directly from the FBI’s servers in suburban Washington. Some of the children depicted in the illicit files were below kindergarten age.