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Some of the images described in court filings involved children barely old enough for kindergarten.

That approach is a significant departure from the governmentвЂ™s past tactics for battling online child porn, in which agents were instructed that they should not allow images of children being sexually assaulted to become public. The Justice Department has said that children depicted in such images are harmed each time they are viewed, and once those images leave the governmentвЂ™s control, agents have no way to prevent them from being copied and re-copied to other parts of the internet. Officials acknowledged those risks, but said they had no other way to identify the people accessing the sites. вЂњThere was no other way we could identify as many players.вЂќ вЂњWe had a window of opportunity to get into one of the darkest places on Earth, and not a lot of other options except to not do it,вЂќ said Ron Hosko, a former senior FBI official who was involved in planning one of the agencyвЂ™s first efforts to take over a child porn site. Lawyers for child pornography victims expressed surprise that the FBI would agree to such tactics вЂ“ in part because agents had rejected them in the past вЂ“ but nonetheless said they approved. вЂњItвЂ™s not like theyвЂ™re blasting it out to the world.вЂќ вЂњThese are places where people know exactly what theyвЂ™re getting when they arrive,вЂќ said James Marsh, who represents some of the children depicted in some of the most widely-circulated images. The FBI hacks have drawn repeated вЂ“ though so far unsuccessful вЂ“ legal challenges, largely centered on the search warrants agents obtained before agentsВ cracked the computer network.Д«ut they have also prompted a backlash of a different kind. In a court filing, a lawyer for one of the men arrested after the FBI sting charged that вЂњwhat the government did in this case is comparable to flooding a neighborhood with heroin in the hope of snatching an assortment of low-level drug users.вЂќ The defense lawyer,В Colin Fieman, asked a federal judge to throw out child pornography charges against his client, former middle school teacher Jay Michaud.В A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments on that request Friday.ДЇederal agents first noticed Playpen not long after it went online in August, 2014.

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The site was buried in what is often called the вЂњdark web,вЂќ a part of the internet that is accessible to the public only through Tor, network software that bounces usersвЂ™ internet traffic from one computer to another to make it largely untraceable.Д«y March of last year, the FBI said, Playpen had grown to become вЂњthe largest remaining known child pornography hidden service in the world,вЂќ the Justice Department said in a court filing.

FBI agents tracked the site to computer servers in North Carolina, and in February seized the site and quietly moved it to its own facility in Newington, Va. During that time, federal prosecutors told defense lawyers that the site included more than 23,000 sexually explicit images and videos of children. Some of those could be downloaded directly from the governmentвЂ™s computers others were available through links to other hard-to-find locations on the web, Fieman said.

One section of the site was labeled вЂњtoddlers,вЂќ according to court records.