Porn Site Free6.com Gave Federal Agents Free Rein
The operators of a notorious pornography web site granted federal agents administrative access to the site, giving investigators the ability to monitor traffic and public and private chats in an effort to identify users trading “a significant amount of child pornography,” records show.
Beginning in October 2008, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents secretly monitored activity on Free6.com from inside the porn site, which launched in 1998. That covert operation ended earlier this year when Los Angeles-based ICE agents discovered that the web site “had been removed from the Internet by the company responsible for hosting the website.”
To determine what happened to the site, agents assigned to the Child Exploitation Investigations Group (CEIG) subsequently contacted a Free6.com administrator with whom they had previously worked. It was then that they learned the man was “incarcerated in the Philippines and facing charges for running an adult pornography business contrary to Filipino law.”
