The lawyer of a defendant in the case stated that the FBI not only operated the website, but improved it so its number of visitors rose sharply while it was under their control. exactly the same crime the bureau sought to stop. The investigation was criticized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation because of the generality of the warrant, and because after having taken control of the website, the FBI continued for nearly two weeks to operate the website and thus distribute child pornography, i.e. The FBI preferred to keep the NIT malware a secret for future investigations. In 2017, the FBI dropped charges against one defendant after the court for that case requested details on the NIT malware. His two co-defendants pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 20 years each earlier in 2017 for their involvement in Playpen. Chase, a 58-year-old from Florida who created the website, to 30 years in prison in May 2017. The investigation led to the sentencing of Steven W. Only a mishap of the site owner revealing his IP address finally allowed the law enforcement to track down both page and personnel. This was because the website was hosted anonymously through Tor. While the FBI claimed to have knowledge about the existence of the website right from its beginning, it was unable to track down the servers locations or the site owner. The operation led to the arrest of 956 site users and five prison sentences.

During this time the FBI used a malware-based ' Network Investigative Technique' to hack into the web browsers of users accessing the site, thereby revealing their identities. The shutdown operation, called Operation Pacifier, involved the FBI hijacking the site and continuing to serve content for two weeks (from Februuntil March 4, 2015). When it was shut down in March 2015, the site had over 215,000 users and hosted 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children as young as toddlers. After his capture, the FBI continued to run the website for another 13 days as part of Operation Pacifier.

After running the website for 6 months, the website owner Steven W. The website operated through the Tor network which allowed users to use the website anonymously. Playpen was a notorious darknet child pornography website that operated from August 2014 to March 2015.

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