United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 23-1010 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. DENY MITROVICH, Defendant-Appellant. ____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 1:18-cr-00789-1 — Gary Feinerman, Judge. ____________________

ARGUED NOVEMBER 29, 2023 — DECIDED MARCH 12, 2024 ____________________

Before RIPPLE, SCUDDER, and JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judges. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge. A sprawling multinational investi- gation resulted in the indictment of Deny Mitrovich, a Chi- cago native, for possessing child pornography. To mount a defense, Mitrovich sought technical information about the software program that Australia and New Zealand had used to identify his computer. The United States did not have that information and, despite repeated efforts, was not able to 2 No. 23-1010 obtain it. Even so, Mitrovich asserts that the government was duty bound to produce the requested information under Rule 16(a)(1)(E) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The dis- trict court disagreed. So do we. Because Rule 16 does not im- pose an obligation to produce documents held exclusively by foreign authorities and because Mitrovich has failed to prove either suppression or prejudice under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), we affirm. I A In 2014 the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investi- gating a child-pornography website called The Love Zone. It existed on the dark web, a collection of unindexed pages that cannot be accessed through traditional search engines. To visit the site, a user needed a particular software program called a TOR browser that conceals their IP address—a digital identifier of the accessing device and local network. By rout- ing encrypted data through multiple servers, TOR browsers enable users to navigate the internet without disclosing their identity or location. Or so Deny Mitrovich thought. A few months into its investigation, the FBI learned that someone in Australia was administering The Love Zone using physical servers in the Netherlands. The Bureau alerted Aus- tralian and Dutch authorities, who seized the server and ar- rested the administrator. Australia and New Zealand then se- cured the administrator’s cooperation, which allowed them to infiltrate and run the website themselves. Over the summer of 2014, the two Oceanian authorities worked alongside international counterparts to identify and No. 23-1010 3 arrest Love Zone users. U.S. agents provided assistance by ex- tracting data from copies of the server, compiling databases, sharing leads, and issuing subpoenas at the request of foreign allies. By November 2014, Australia and New Zealand devel- oped a technique to pierce the anonymity provided by TOR browsers. Impersonating the administrator of The Love Zone, they posted a message advertising a new child pornography video. The message contained a hyperlink. When users clicked on it, the link prompted them to stream a file from an external website on Windows Media Player. Anyone who did so unknowingly revealed their IP address. Australia and New Zealand forwarded the FBI any IP ad- dresses belonging to networks in the United States. The Bu- reau then traced them to physical addresses. One belonged to the defendant Deny Mitrovich. Law enforcement obtained a warrant to search Mitrovich’s home, which yielded hard drives containing troves of child pornography.