(credit: Tristan Schnurr) On Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington state tossed all the evidence in a child pornography case that was obtained via an FBI-deployed Tor exploit. Absent a successful government appeal, it seems extremely difficult for prosecutors going forward in United States v. Michaud, suggesting that judges are continuing to push back on the FBI’s deployment of hacking tools. "It's hard to see how the government can secure a conviction without this key evidence," Ahmed Ghappour, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, told Ars. Judges in at least two related cases in other states have also ruled in favor of defendants, on the grounds that the Virginia-issued warrant to deploy the NIT (network investigative technique) malware was invalid from the start.