Dark Web | Child Safety |Ethics

Police Ran the World’s Largest Child Abuse Site for 11 Months. Its Creator Had No Regrets.

Task Force Argos saved hundreds of children. They also kept real abuse material in circulation to do it. I don’t think both things can be reconciled — and I’m not sure they should be.

Image generated by author using ChatGPT

I’ve been sitting with this story for a while because I don’t think it has a clean answer, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you it does.

Here’s the shape of it. In 2016, a man named **Benjamin Faulkner built a site on the dark web called [Child’s Play.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childs_Play_(website)) **He was twenty-something, from a small town in Ontario, taught swimming at the YMCA, played trumpet in a local band. His mother called him gentle. He was also, quietly, one of the most prolific facilitators of child sexual abuse material on the internet, and the site he built grew to over a million registered accounts.

Police caught him. And then they did something almost nobody expected. They kept his site running — as him — for eleven months.

How he got caught

Faulkner wasn’t some untouchable ghost. He was good at anonymity, good at encryption, good at covering his tracks online. But he made an ordinary mistake: he hit a bug in his site’s code, couldn’t fix it himself, and posted a screenshot of it on a public programming forum asking for help. A Homeland Security investigator who’d been watching for exactly this kind of slip found it.

His partner in a separate site, a man in Tennessee going by “Fault,” made an even simpler error — he registered a Bitcoin wallet to his real email address. Investigators traced it in minutes.

Knowing who they were wasn’t enough, though. If either man suspected he was being watched, he could wipe everything in seconds. So investigators waited for the two of them to meet in person, which they did periodically, and in October 2016, the FBI broke down the door of the house where Faulkner was visiting Fault. Inside: a camera, and footage of the two of them abusing a four-year-old girl.

Faulkner had said publicly, more than once, that if he was ever caught, he’d protect his site and its users no matter what. He lasted about as long as it took to get him on the floor. He handed over everything — usernames, passwords, encryption keys — within minutes.

The decision

This is the part I keep turning over.

Task Force Argos, the Australian police unit that ended up with the keys, had a choice. Shut the site down immediately, which ends the immediate harm but tells you almost nothing about who’s using it or where the children in its images actually are. Or keep it running, take on the site’s identity, and use it as a net.

They chose the net.

Faulkner had built in a safeguard: a monthly “canary” post, written in his voice, confirming the site hadn’t been compromised. If it stopped appearing, users were to scatter immediately. And he’d added one more requirement he was sure no police force would ever cross — every canary had to end with an actual image of child abuse, because he believed no government would authorize an officer to post one.

He was wrong. They studied his writing until they could imitate it — his phrasing, his typos, his sense of humor — and they crossed that line. They posted the image. The canary held. Nobody on the site suspected a thing.

For eleven months, a police unit in Brisbane ran the site under Faulkner’s identity. They read private messages, tracked IPs, and built cases against the most active producers. And the site kept functioning normally the entire time — meaning people kept posting content, kept viewing it, kept sharing it, because that’s what running it “normally” required. Nearly 800,000 people viewed one thread involving an eight-year-old while police controlled the server.

Who found them, really?

While all this was happening, two Norwegian journalists — Håkon Høidal and Einar Stangvik — were independently investigating the same site for a newspaper story. Stangvik found a technical flaw that made the server reveal its own location. It led to a hosting company in Sydney, which led, eventually, to a burger place near Task Force Argos’s headquarters, where the journalists sat down with the detectives running the operation and told them: " We know it’s you.”

The police asked them to sit on the story. Publishing early would blow eleven months of work in an instant. The journalists agreed to wait, on the understanding that investigators would keep them informed as arrests happened. According to their later reporting, those updates mostly didn’t come. When the journalist independently found out that the operation had ended two days earlier without anyone telling him, he and his paper published everything.

What it actually cost, and what it actually bought

The public reaction split about how you’d expect. UNICEF’s legal team called it a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Amnesty International called the tactics unacceptable under human rights law. At the time, Australian law didn’t even have a clear legal provision letting police possess or distribute this kind of material for investigative purposes — the operation ran in a genuine legal gray zone the whole time. One mother whose daughter’s images had already been circulating before the operation began said plainly that every additional share, even under police control, hurt her child again. Not helped her. Hurt her.

Task Force Argos’s answer was that every day the site stayed open was a day they were identifying real abusers and locating real children who were suffering active harm right then, not in some abstract sense.

Both things happened. That’s what makes this hard. The operation identified more than 900 suspects across over a dozen countries and removed more than 85 children from ongoing abuse. Real people went to prison who otherwise wouldn’t have — a site administrator in his twenties, a former science teacher, a man in Florida who’d run a separate network focused on infants and eventually received a 90-year sentence. And also: for eleven months, a government-run server kept distributing material that revictimized real, identifiable kids every time someone viewed it, and it’s not clear the people harmed by that had any say in the tradeoff being made on their behalf.

Faulkner

Courts sentenced both him and Fault to life for the abuse of the four-year-old, plus another 35 years each for running the enterprise. At his second sentencing, as the prosecutor read out the full record of what he’d done, his lawyer thought he was crying. He wasn’t. He was laughing, and it apparently took a while for the grin to go away. Later, from prison, he was asked if he had regrets, and he said he’d do it again.

I don’t have a tidy way to close this out. I think the operation likely did more good than harm in the narrow, measurable sense — they found children, and men went to prison who otherwise would not have gotten caught. But “likely did more good than harm” is a strange, cold thing to say about a decision that involved a government agency choosing, deliberately, to keep real abuse material in active circulation for nearly a year, using real children’s images as the cost of admission. Both the people defending that choice and the people condemning it are responding to something true. I don’t think picking a side does justice to either.

What Griffiths himself said about the line they crossed

Griffiths later explained the legal mechanism that let them do any of this at all, in an interview with IBTimes UK. Australian law allows a judge to authorize what’s called a controlled operation — a narrow exception that lets police commit acts that would otherwise result in prosecution, specifically for investigations like this one. In his own words, this exemption protects officers from prosecution for the specific crimes the operation requires.

He was also candid, years later, about how much of “becoming” Warhead was mental rather than technical, in VG’s original investigation — impersonating someone with a recognizable online voice meant more than copying phrasing; by his account, he had to actually think like the person, not just write like him.

The moment their cover was blown is documented in CBC’s “Hunting Warhead” reporting. When journalist Håkon Høidal told Griffiths and colleague Jon Rouse, face to face, that he already knew Warhead was the police, Høidal recalled Griffiths going “purple and quiet,” while Rouse stiffened and demanded to know how they’d been found out before saying anything more. Not guilt, by every account — just the shock of an eleven-month operation nearly unraveling in a burger restaurant.

Takeaway

I don’t think this story resolves into a lesson. But if there’s a throughline, it’s this: the tools that make institutions accountable, journalism, oversight, public scrutiny, and the tools that let an operation like this work at all — secrecy, deception, controlled illegality are in direct tension, and nobody gets to have both at full strength at once. Task Force Argos needed the secrecy to make arrests. Høidal and VG needed to break that secrecy to make the operation answerable to anyone outside it. Both were doing their actual job. That’s not a comfortable takeaway, but I think it’s the “only” honest one I can think of. What do you say?

— © Misbaah Sheikhh 2026

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