Vox Sentences: The FBI ran a child porn site

The UK says Putin probably ordered a hit on an ex-KGB agent; SNOMGWTFBBQ; and, yes, the FBI ran a child porn site.

TOP NEWS

The case of the polonium tea

Carl Court/Getty Images

• A British government investigation has concluded that Vladimir Putin probably personally approved the murder of an ex-KGB agent in London in 2006.

  [Reuters / Michael Holden]

• The agent, Alexander Litvinenko, was killed by a lethal dose of radioactive polonium shortly after meeting for tea with two other former KGB agents.

  [BBC]

• The British investigation concluded those agents, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, poisoned Litvinenko. But, it said, the murder had probably been approved by Russian officials including Putin himself.

  [NYT]

• (An alternative theory held that Litvinenko had been killed by the Russian mafia, which he was reportedly investigating when he was killed, but there's less evidence for that.)

  [The Guardian / Esther Addley, Luke Harding, and Shaun Winter]

• The case against Lugovoi, in particular, is pretty convincing. Among other things, Lugovoi reportedly sent a T-shirt that said "Polonium-210" and "Nuclear death is knocking on your door" to a friend of Litvinenko's after his death.

  [Mirror (UK) Richard Wheatstone]

• Lugovoi is now a member of the Russian parliament.

  [NYT / Alan Cowell]

• Here's the problem for Britain: It needs Russia's cooperation in the fight against ISIS, among other things, and it really can't blow up relations over a decade-old crime.

  [The Guardian / Patrick Wintour]

• So the British government is in the odd position of admitting that the murder was a "blatant and unacceptable" violation of international law, while not actually taking any punitive measures against Russia — in other words, accepting the unacceptable violation.

  [The Guardian / Luke Harding, Patrick Wintour, Esther Addley, and Shaun Walker]

SNOMG

John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images

• If you live on the East Coast, or are consuming any East Coast-based media, you probably know there is a big storm coming.

  [Vox / Brian Resnick]

• Seriously, it is very big. We're talking 2+ feet in the Baltimore/DC area and up to a foot in New York — with 25+ mph winds.

  [CNBC / Robert Ferris]

• For the government and people of DC, for whom a mere inch of snow last night plunged the city into utter chaos, this might bode poorly. But don't panic: Wednesday's mishigas might have been caused, in part, by everyone preparing for this weekend instead.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• There's evidence that the first snow of the winter is the most dangerous, simply because people have forgotten how to drive in it.

  [American Journal of Public Health / Daniel Eisenberg and Kenneth D. Warner]

• If you are in the snowbelt and have not prepared, don't worry about stocking up on bread and milk, which are massively overrated bunker foods.

  [Washington Post / Drew Harwell]

• But do practice your penguin walk, the single best way to prevent slipping on the ice (short of not going outside at all).

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

No, really, the FBI ran a child porn site

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• The FBI has acknowledged that it operated the child porn site Playpen for two weeks in 2015, after seizing the site but before shutting it down.

  [USA Today / Brad Heath]

• The agency kept the site running so that it could track down users, thanks to malware it had programmed the site to install on their computers.

  [Washington Post / Ellen Nakashima]

• Over the time the FBI ran the site, about 23,000 child porn images and videos were downloaded. The FBI has charged 137 users with crimes.

  [USA Today / Brad Heath]

• There are two ethical problems here. One is the use of tracking malware — something the FBI has also admitted to doing in 2013, when it infected a massive number of people using the privacy network Tor with tracking malware (even though many of them were not doing anything illegal by using the service).

  [Wired / Kevin Poulsen]

• The other is the fact that running a child porn site is illegal when normal people do it. The defense lawyers for one of the Playpen defendants have tried to argue that the FBI's tactics amount to child porn dissemination itself — meaning their prosecution of users is totally illegitimate.

  [Motherboard / Joseph Cox]

• This defense is unlikely to succeed. US law gives law enforcement very broad leeway to engage in criminal activity for the sake of tracking down the "real" criminals.

  [Stanford Law Review / Elizabeth Joh]

MISCELLANEOUS

Woody Guthrie wrote poems attacking Donald Trump's father (who he called "Old Man Trump") for racist housing practices. [The Conversation / Will Kaufman]

• Shane Bauer was imprisoned in Iran for more than two years. Whenever Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attacked Iran publicly, his predicament would get worse.

  [Mother Jones / Shane Bauer]

• 22 judges, one simple question: What is the most scientifically ambitious punishment you've ever given to a shoplifter? No. 19 will shock you.

  [Clickhole]

• One big reason why John Maynard Keynes's prediction of a 21st century full of leisure and short on work didn't come to pass: inequality.

  [The Atlantic / Rebecca J. Rosen]

• Ever wondered what happened to Monica and Chandler after Friends? Luke and Lorelai after Gilmore Girls? Jim and Pam after The Office? Chris Scott has the answers.

  [Medium / Chris Scott]

VERBATIM

"At one point, fourteen Icarians shared a single boiled pigeon for dinner. A few of them died from a combination of dysentery, starvation, and malaria. One man was killed by lightning. Their only doctor went mad. Amid all of this, documents were discovered in the luggage of Adolphe Gouhenant that exposed him as a paid spy for the recently deposed Louis Philippe and a Jesuit to boot. He was shorn of his beard and long blond hair and sent off into the wilderness." [New Republic / Chris Jennings]

• "Poor Dr. Kang, she's this great woman and she's so serious, God bless her, but I was like, 'Do you mind telling me when you're about to shoot the sperm up there? Because I have a song picked out to help and I want to play it at the exact moment.' I picked 'Eye of the Tiger.'"

  [Kate Elazegui to NY Mag / Alexa Tsoulis-Reay]

• "In South Africa, he was linked to the death of an employee who was mauled by a lion. (The charge was eventually dropped.) Ras has also been questioned about the murder of a Russian stripper and charged with distributing a veterinary-grade tranquilizer that may have caused the woman’s death. He has been arrested multiple times on charges related to rhino poaching and is accused of being the kingpin of one of South Africa’s largest ­rhino-poaching syndicates. 'He’s like the Teflon Don of the animal-poaching world,' Rocky says."

  [California Sunday / Tessa Stuart]

• "If artificial intelligence develops as swiftly and powerfully as researchers such as Nick Bostrom predict, we might be dispatched swiftly not by Skynet-sponsored Terminators but by an army of snuggly therapy bots; our A.I. overlords could look more like Oprah than HAL."

  [Slate / Christine Rosen]

• "Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, the director of the National Cancer Institute, announced in 2003 that his organization’s goal was to 'eliminate suffering and death' caused by cancer by 2015. During an appropriations hearing, Dr. von Eschenbach got into a public bargaining session with Senator Arlen Specter, then a Republican from Pennsylvania, about how much money Dr. von Eschenbach would need to advance the date of the cure … 'Six-hundred million a year?" Mr. Specter asked. "And you can move the date from 2015 to 2010?' 'Yes, sir,' Mr. von Eschenbach said. Mr. Specter died of cancer in 2012."

  [NYT / Gina Kolata and Gardiner Harris]

CORRECTION: This post originally erroneously stated that Litvinenko was killed by plutonium; he was killed by polonium.

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