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FBI Posts Fake Hyperlinks To Trap Downloaders of Illegal Porn
mytrip brings us a story from news.com about an FBI operation in which agents posted hyperlinks which advertised child pornography, recorded the IP addresses of people who clicked the links, and then tracked them down and raided their homes. The article contains a fairly detailed description of how the operation progressed, and it raises questions about the legality and reliability of getting people to click "unlawful" hyperlinks. Quoting:
"With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account--and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids. The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any "computer-related" equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any "addressed correspondence" sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements. While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn't be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant."
Ok, I'm not one to throw around the term willy nilly, but this seems like it fits the very definition of entrapment.
You should be scared- you can have all your thousands of dollars of computer equipment and hard drives seized indefinitely just because you clicked on a link. I'm wayyyyyyyyy more terrified of the FBI than of terrorists, and I'm no criminal.
Crawlers is "clicking" the links, and is indeed a part of developing a search engine.
People get really stupid when it comes to crimes involving children. They stop using their brains and get extremely emotional. Thus, law enforcement can get away with things they couldn't otherwise. When it comes to sex and children, all logic is out the door. The best example, which unfortunately I can't find a link to right now, is two minors, boyfriend and girlfriend, (they were in the 16-17 range) sent each other naked pictures of themselves via the Internet. This got found out and they were charged with possession, production and distribution of child pornography and sentenced to prison. This was then upheld on appeal. Yes, that's right, kids sentenced to jail and will be labeled as sex offenders for life for taking naked pictures of their own bodies.
Thus even if this is entrapment, it won't matter, because of the crime it involves. Logic and due process just get pushed aside for emotion and a witch hunt mentality.
Well, considering this a year ago http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/10/1752233 you don't even have to be an adult to be considered a pedophile on the internet
I'd like to give a shout-out to all of the people on the "Stealing wireless has no victims" thread earlier today.
Big brother seems to have fewer blocks from running over our rights these days. I have watched this country hand over it's basic civil rights since 9/11 in the name of patriotism, law and order and nationalism. Read some history, this is how the Nazi's rose to power, using dogma so akin to what we hear these days. Some people say the terrorists won, I disagree. Someone more sinister and evil than them won, they were just the vehicle for it, the excuse.
You do NOT take power away from a government once it has it without a great struggle. In our fear, we have with blind trust handed over our freedoms, leaving common sense behind us. This is just one dangerous step down a wide path to destruction by allowing such flimsy standards for law enforcement. Sure, the reasons they use may on the surface and the moment seem justified, but it sets a dangerous president that will erode our rights even further. Ask yourself, how far will they go to probe us to find our resistance? When will we if ever cry out for a stop to this madness? At what point will we say "enough is enough"?
History shows us how the people of Germany failed to stop the Nazis. The Nazis were few in number, one would think the German people could have rose up and crushed them. But they were fearful, law abiding and followed the dogma. They thought they were doing the right thing. A monster was loosed on the world because of their inaction. How much of a monster will we Americans unleash on the world if we fail to control our nation? If you don't think it can happen here, don't be foolish. The German people didn't think it could happen to them. They didn't all wake up and decide to be world villains, wringing their hands and laughing madly with each other over plans of world domination. How are we different than them? What strange magic protects us from evil men? Our Constitution? It is but a document, words on paper that can't stop an ant from crawling over it. It has to live in our hearts and minds and we have to be vigilant to defend what we believe in. Only then do those words have any power.
What can you do? For now you can vote. You should do it and be responsible to cast that vote to support your ideals, not the flavor of the year dogma. We should all be thankful that we can vote. When the day comes that we can't, we will wish so hard we could because the struggle back to the vote will be long and hard and most likely brutal.
Attacks on our freedoms cannot be suffered and ignored; tolerance in this case is a form of defeat.
Take the Red Pill.
The law in most jurisdictions makes no distinction between photos of postpubescent minors and photos of prepubescent minors. Yes, there's a big difference between ephebophilia and true pedophilia (both from a psychological perspective and in terms of what kind of threat the person might pose), but that doesn't mean the law recognizes any difference. Under US law, "child pornography" includes images of 5-year-olds, 12-year-olds, and 17-year-olds.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
So in order to totall screw someone all you have to do is get on their box, phisically or by cracking and download some kiddy porn. Then drop a dime on them (just in case you did not click on the honey pot) and voila! Instant conviction. Yes. some men have been convicted of child port violations with zero evidence above the files in their cache.
"This message was sent from an Apple
It really is worse than that. Any site you go to can link any content from any other site, and not show it to you -- just load it transparently in the background. You will have downloaded the material without your knowledge and it will be in your cache when they break your door down.
The article plainly states that they do not even bother to record the referring URL or page, which means they don't care if you were prank porn'd. Considering some freaks are out there getting SWAT called on people it's realistic to expect that this will be a toy of choice for disgruntled former life partners and competetive coworkers with an evil bent. You'll be guilty of committing a crime completely without your knowledge. You won't just lose your equipment -- you will go to PMITA prison and spend the rest of your life on the registry. Same with if you have an HTML email with the content embedded but otherwise looking harmless. Since there are hundreds of thousands of compromised sites out there, and millions of spam bots the internet bad guys could get almost all of us on this list pretty quickly. Also some browser plugins automatically download all of the pages linked from your current page in the background to speed up browsing.
What this means is that this Internet is now useless with pictures. Or embedded content of any kind.
I'm all for catching and punishing the freaks that seek out this content and most especially the ones that publish it. But to leave enforcement this wide open to abuse is just wrong.
It's time to browse with Lynx again. Who would have thought that would come up again for people who weren't blind?
Just about the only alternative that works is browsing via secure remote desktop from offshore hosting.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If I found out about the url and I had a bot net then I'd do it deliberately.
Heads would roll when they figured out that all the clicks they got were fake and they had siezed thousands of innocent people's stuff.
The courts would also think twice about approving stuff like this.
Many states of the USA have serious problems with the process of charging and convicting rapists even when DNA and medical evidence is available and the same people that would normally be working on this are trying to create some sort of thought criminal instead. When it comes down to it there is nothing at all here that actually has anything to do with child abuse - it's about asking somebody to look at something suspicious and seeing if they click on a link.
And all the people with link prefetching (like myself) turned on just "clicked" that link from the point of view of the FBI.
Not a sentence!
You know... i hate this mentality. I *like* people who leave their wireless routers open. I think they're friendly and good-neighborly and i think this attitude screws that all to hell. IANAL, but to the best of my legal knowledge you have almost no liability over someone else using your wireless *despite* what the RIAA says. Remember, they sue you becuase your IP address is being used, but if they don't find any corroborating evidence on your computer that you've violated copyright then they have nothing.
/.'ers don't seem to feel the same way???
The more you *bow* to the government and let them change your behavior even when what you're doing is not illegal, the more power you give them. I don't know how we let things get to this state in our country when it comes to wireless access.
I *want* people to leave their wireless access open, and I *don't* want people to feel that even though they're not doing something illegal they have to change their behavior because the police or other government folks are trying to push us into line.
Why is it that YOU guys, you
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!