Norwegian hacker Einar Otto Stangvik on how he exposed Childs Play, a dark web pedophile forum that was hosted by Australian Police as part of a sting operation
ByDaniel Mützeltranslated byDaniel Stächelin — Einar Otto Stangvik talks with us about online child pornography … Tweets: @yashalevine and @troyhunt Tweets: Yasha Levine / @yashalevine : Think about this: a Norwegian guy who works for a newspaper found a way to punch through Tor's ultra-secure defenses. Evil governments (especially the ones who fund Tor through multimillion dollar contracts) could never do this. Duh. http://motherboard.vice.com/ ... Troy Hunt / @troyhunt : Quality piece on @einaros about some amazing work he's doing. A great bloke making a real difference: http://motherboard.vice.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This interview is the inside account of an operation that broke open a month earlier, when The Guardian reported that Australian police had run the Childs Play pedophile forum themselves, with thousands of active users, to feed a global sting. What was new here is who did the breaking: not law enforcement, but Einar Otto Stangvik, a Norwegian security researcher working with a newspaper.
The story also lands on contested ground. Court records had already shown Australian authorities hacking Tor users inside the US and sharing findings with the FBI, and the FBI's own campaign of hacking computers in Denmark, Greece and Chile showed how far these stings crossed borders. Yasha Levine's framing in the coverage — that a private researcher punched through Tor's defenses where government funders of Tor could not — turns a policing success into a question about who audits state-run dark web operations.
First-order effects
- Stangvik's disclosure forces Australian police to defend a sting that depended on secretly operating criminal infrastructure, now that its existence and its Tor weakness are public.
- The Tor Project faces renewed scrutiny over whether the bypass method Stangvik found is a real vulnerability, given the project's dependence on multimillion-dollar government contracts cited in the coverage.
Second-order effects
- Other agencies running similar forum-hosting stings must assume independent researchers can find and expose their infrastructure too, raising the operational cost of the tactic documented in the earlier US court filings.
- Civilian researchers and journalists emerge as a de facto oversight layer over cross-border hacking operations that courts only partially expose, pressuring agencies to disclose more proactively.
Third-order effects
- If state-hosted dark web stings keep getting unmasked by outsiders, the practice heads toward a formal accountability framework — legal limits on which infrastructure agencies may operate and what they must disclose when civilians breach it.
- The episode feeds a longer legitimacy problem for Tor: every demonstrated bypass, whether by researchers or by the government contractors funding the network, erodes the assumption that anonymity holds against well-resourced adversaries.
The trend: Dark web law enforcement operations are shifting from covert infrastructure runs toward a contested model in which independent researchers can and do audit state-run stings from the outside.