According to court documents, U.S. government lawyers are obstructing efforts that might provide light on how the FBI was able to identify a real IP address of a visitor to an ISIS website on the dark web.
Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari is the subject of the case; he was accused of trying to support ISIS financially in May 2020. In the accusation against him, it is claimed that on May 14, 2019, Al-Azhari repeatedly accessed a dark web page that contains “unofficial material and images associated to ISIS.” It should have been challenging for the site owner or a third party to discover the genuine IP address of any of the site’s visitors because the website was a dark web site, or one that was hosted on the Tor anonymity network.
But the FBI actually did it. It was discovered that Al-Azhari allegedly viewed the website from a Riverside, California, IP address connected to Al-Azhari’s grandmother’s house. The FBI also discovered which specific web pages Al-Azhari visited, including a section on Bitcoin donations, a section dedicated to ISIS fighters’ military actions in Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria, and a website that offered connections to content from ISIS’s media wing. This shouldn’t have been possible without the FBI using some kind of monitoring technology or without Al-Azhari accessing the website in a way that revealed their IP address.
The Department of Justice’s lawyers are now refusing to disclose how the organisation obtained Al-IP Azhari’s address in a recent set of documents and are preventing discussion of the matter from appearing on the public docket.
Defense lawyer Samuel E. Landes stated in a filing made public on Tuesday that the government “had declined to divulge any material relevant to their TOR operation” during discovery.
Despite hacking techniques becoming more prevalent in a variety of different types of criminal investigations, the story underlines the Department of Justice’s persistent and strict secrecy regarding its use of them. The consequences of that secrecy may be that defendants are unable to adequately contest the legal basis of the case because they lack access to information about how they were identified. Prosecutors have occasionally lost trials because it was thought more necessary to keep the evidence hidden than to succeed in court.