United States v. Levin

TORRUELLA, Circuit Judge.

Central to this case is the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (“FBI” or “government”) use of software that it terms a Network Investigative Technique (“NIT”). The FBI used the NIT pursuant to a warrant it obtained from a magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia (the “NIT warrant”), The FBI installed the NIT on Playpen, a child pornography website it had taken over and was. operating out of Virginia. The NIT attached itself to anything that was downloaded from Playpen, and thus effectively travelled to the computers that were downloading from the website,…