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Admin Sentenced 27 Years In Prison For Hosting Child Pornography

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Faceless hooded anonymous computer hacker with programming code from monitor, dark web concept

As a web host, you cannot completely reject responsibility for the content that customers offer on their own computers. This is especially true if you look the other way at the dissemination of depictions of child abuse.

This now shows the end of a very long process that was carried out in the USA against the former operator Freedom Hostings and reported by The Record. It was a hoster who limited its services more or less with the foresight to the Darknet. The aim was to offer a platform on which customers would not have expected any control.

The service was run by a man in Ireland. This offered access to a classic hosting environment with PHP and MySQL and only asked for a one-time fee of 5 dollars. As a result, Freedom Hosting quickly rose to become the largest hoster in the dark web, from which it is estimated that half of all .onion websites were served.

Anonymous ushered in the end

However, in 2011 Anonymous activists exposed the service as one of the largest sources of child pornography and launched massive DDoS attacks. The law enforcement authorities became aware of the provider and initiated an investigation. In 2013, the entire service was finally shut down. Since then, however, the operator has tried to escape access by the US judiciary. In Ireland, he led a long legal battle against extradition to the USA and tried to obtain Russian citizenship at the same time. Ultimately, none of this was of any use and he was handed over to the US authorities.

The process there took over two years. In the course of this, the defendant also admitted his guilt – that was already in February 2020. Due to various circumstances, it took a long time until the final verdict was pronounced. But now the sentence has been announced: The man has to be behind bars for a period of 27 years. The court did not fully exhaust the maximum possible framework of 30 years. The court also placed him under lifelong supervision, so the man must report to the authorities regularly even after his release in the distant future and explain that he will not resume his previous work.