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Is the Outrage Over the FBI's Seattle Times Tactics a Knee-Jerk Reaction?

Posted by samzenpus on from the wait-a-second dept.

reifman writes The Internet's been abuzz the past 48 hours about reports the FBI distributed malware via a fake Seattle Times news website. What the agency actually did is more of an example of smart, precise law enforcement tactics. Is the outrage online an indictment of Twitter's tendency towards uninformed, knee-jerk reactions? In this age of unwarranted, unconstitutional blanket data collection by the NSA, the FBI's tactics from 2007 seem refreshing for their precision.

1 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why not? (Re:No. Just no.) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Not only that, but from what I can tell there was no malware. And the fake website was just a page on a website where the FBI could see the logs. They e-mailed him a link to a story. When he clicked on the link they could see the IP address which requested the story. Nothing I read says it was any more sophisticated than that. I'm not sure they'd even need a warrant to do this. It's no different then e-mailing him a phone number and looking at the caller ID when he calls it. That's not private information.