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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."
Not going to lie to you, this post makes you seem like a child pornographer or a viewer of child pornography. No one can accidentally click a pop up with naked babies on it. Someone must be subconsciously drawn to such things else they'd have to actively click the link. In either case, the person in question probably ought to be in therapy/arrested.
This has got to stop. There's lots of software, from pre-fetching browsers to web crawlers to proxies to HTML validators that read other web sites.
I have a proxy-like tool available on line which occasionally gets abused. It's a lightweight HTML validator and debugging tool, intended to answer the question "why did the crawler misinterpret my site". You put in a URL, and the indicated page is fetched and parsed into a tree. Javascript and embedded objects are removed, and links are made absolute. Then the tree is converted back to properly indented HTML for display. This shows a web crawler's view of a web site; if the output doesn't look reasonably similar to the original page, your site probably won't be indexed properly by search engines.
This tool is regularly abused as a proxy server. At one point, somebody even built a call to it into the Debian build process because they needed to read HTTPS from some code that didn't know how to talk SSL. (That's been fixed.) There's still some bozo who has a script that reads pages from the Weather Channel through this tool. Every five minutes. I finally to put a big banner at the top of each output page to discourage people from using it as a general purpose proxy server.
So now I have to worry about someone using it to read the FBI's p0rn collection.
Thanks for the revealing reply, but P2P's not the point. And you're creepy too. You're trying to excuse the crime by admitting that you had such an insatiable Internet porn fetish that you couldn't even take the time to read the filenames, let alone WATCH the damned things. And why, after reading a statement claiming the FBI is tracking and prosecuting folks based on casual (public) internet use, would you admit to abusing public P2P forums like KaZaA? Big Brother does not approve.
I would almost care, if I didn't think pedos deserve it.
Let's get something straight. Being a pedo isn't a crime, it's a condition. Acting on those pedo urges is a crime.