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Yeah, the EU is doing a great job at food monitoring. Fucking hilarious.

deliberate political policy

Today the statists have us burning our food, while simultaneously driving pig farmers and egg producers out of business with animal `welfare' regulation and high feed cost.

Naturally, when the crash comes it will be the fault of `corporations.'

I wouldn't say it's the statists burning our food, or at least in my limited experience it wasn't the case. I grew up in a rural Indiana town and outside of a single factory, the largest portion of its economy is corn. When I was in HS in the 90's there were a couple years when the farmers had absolutely huge yields ... so much so in fact the price of corn went through the floor. Having family members that own large farms, it literally cost them more to drag the corn to the grain elevator for sale in gas/time/pay for farmhands than it was worth. End result? Pile it up and hope the price increases. When the price didn't increase and it started to rot, burn it and take the loss.

At first I was a bit disgusted. After all, we were just talking about starving kids in Africa and Susanne Sommers makes a great pitch! But then I realized that in order to get that corn to the folks that need it, someone has to pay the farmer or HIS FAMILY will be the ones starving. (Maybe not literally starving, but they'd certainly lose the farm.)

Makes the ethanol mandates and their timing make more sense now that I think about it. A politician (or group there of) would be very likely to make the mistake "Corn is too cheap! Let's artificially create demand by using it in gasoline!" ... without taking into account the fact that not all harvests are nearly as good.

deliberate political policy

Today the statists have us burning our food, while simultaneously driving pig farmers and egg producers out of business with animal `welfare' regulation and high feed cost.

Naturally, when the crash comes it will be the fault of `corporations.'

You seem to have a good grasp of the technical aspects, but a severe lack of the legal aspects.

The issue is that once you've got an address, then what? In most countries you can't simply hold the subscriber responsible for an illegal act, at best the ISP can hold them responsible for breaching their ISPs subscriber agreement and cut them off after which they go to an ISP.

Even if they get the police to issue a search warrant and search the house, then what next? They can find a computer with content on it, but they have to prove the content wasn't put there via a remote access trojan, they have to prove it wasn't copied through your wireless network to an open share on your computer, they have to prove that you were the person who downloaded the content. Even if they do forensics on the keyboard they may find other people's fingerprints there, but even then can they prove the keyboard hadn't merely been switched?

The fact is, short of catching you red handed there's absolutely no way to conclusively tie someone to a digital crime committed over the internet. Despite this many people get prosecuted, but it's often because they and their lawyers don't have an understanding of the technicalities involved in trying to prove someone guilty of a computer crime and so fail to put their case across, however the closest case to demonstrating was probably this one:

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/breaking-craig-meehan-guilty-but.4495490.jp

Whilst it's almost certain the guy was guilty, what's interesting in this case is the circumstances in which he was discovered, and the judges comments on why he chose to rule against him. Specifically, he was only discovered because his computer was seized as the result of another separate investigation, and that the evidence that mattered was the times which those images were downloaded at demonstrating they were downloaded when he was not at work. So if you were to set downloads going remotely, using an unlogged piece of software, whilst you're at work, or if you also demonstrated the unreliability of time stamps on computer files it's very likely he could well have ended up getting away with it. The Judge had to rely on what came down to mistakes due to a lack of technical understanding on behalf of the defendant.

Of course, all this isn't too relevant to a civil case, the standards of evidence required there are lower, but similarly I think the chance of the police being involved in getting a court order for a search warranty over a few movies and MP3s is also unlikely.

The issue is, you're somewhat right in your analysis of how easy it is to follow an IP trail (with some caveats- covered below), but you're missing the weak point- connecting the IP trail to the perpertrator of the crime.

The caveats to your comments on tracking an IP are that you make the assumption that interim systems log all connections- you point out that someone can hop between routers to mask their IP and then suggest that if there is enough cooperation of IPs, the trail can simply be traced back, but that's only true if all those connections are logged. If I connect to a US torrent client, via a VPN connection to a country that doesn't demand ISPs such as the VPN provider log everything then any attempts to track this will stop at the VPN provider, as there's simply no way to tell which way the connection went then. This is similar to the situation of wireless- if someone has home wireless, and another person connects to it and leeches torrents through their wireless router, a device which rarely logs connections, then the buck is going to stop at the wireless router. There's no way even the police can reasonably say that the owner of the internet connection is responsible if they search his hard drive and find nothing, and if he has an open or low security access point, they wouldn't stand a chance in court.

So I think many appreciate it's true that you're always

Did he build a bomb? Did he threaten to use it? Did he do anything resembling a crime besides wanting to know something?

Did he? No. But apparently the 'book' is not the sole reason for the arrest.

From the Yorkshire Post:
"A court in London was told two weeks ago that the schoolboy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is alleged to have had chemicals used for making bombs under his bed. He is accused of plotting to make bombs following a trip to Pakistan"
"During an anti-terror raid on his home about 500g of potassium nitrate was allegedly found under his bed in the room he shared with his younger brother. Potassium nitrate is a critical oxidising component of gunpowder."

Now...possessing potassium nitrate is not a crime (and 500g might get you a good firecracker), and owning that book is not a crime. Take the two together, along with the arrest of another kid in the same neighborhood, and the case may be that, yeah, maybe these two were planning something. Maybe the first kid coughed up the second kids name as a compatriot. I would not hazard a guess either way.

Hopefully, they will get a reasonable judge and whichever way it goes, they will get the right verdict.

Obviously, strenuously, completely...knowledge should never, ever be illegal. But as usual, TFA is short of the full details. And /. goes bonkers over what was said, instead of finding out more about the situation.

One thing the headline, summary and article itself don't make clear is that this guy had half a kilo of potassium nitrate, 250g of calcium chloride, videos of beheadings and he had recently visited Pakistan. More information article. There's a lot more to this story than "kid reads forbidden book and gets arrested". It sounds more like "this guy looks like he was planning on blowing people up".