Slashdot Mirror
Three Privacy Groups Challenge The FBI's Malware-Obtained Evidence (eff.org)
In 2015 the FBI took over a Tor-accessible child pornography site to infect its users with malware so they could be identified and prosecuted. But now one suspect is challenging that evidence in court, with three different privacy groups filing briefs in his support.
An anonymous reader writes.
One EFF attorney argues it's a classic case of an unreasonable search, which is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution. "If the FBI tried to get a single warrant to search 8,000 houses, such a request would unquestionably be denied." But there's another problem, since the FBI infected users in 120 different countries. "According to Privacy International, the case also raises important questions: What if a foreign country had carried out a similar hacking operation that affected U.S. citizens?" writes Computerworld. "Would the U.S. welcome this...? The U.S. was overstepping its bounds by conducting an investigation outside its borders without the consent of affected countries, the group said."
The FBI's evidence is also being challenged by the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the EFF plans to file two more challenges in March, warning that otherwise "the precedent is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of all Internet users for years to come... Courts need to send a very clear message that vague search warrants that lack the required specifics about who and what is to be searched won't be upheld."
The FBI's evidence is also being challenged by the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the EFF plans to file two more challenges in March, warning that otherwise "the precedent is likely to impact the digital privacy rights of all Internet users for years to come... Courts need to send a very clear message that vague search warrants that lack the required specifics about who and what is to be searched won't be upheld."
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
H. L. Mencken
James Comey and friends spent 2 weeks as the biggest distributors of child porn on the planet, when they took over a child porn website, added server capacity, and kept it running. I get that we want to catch the bad guys, but the FBI is way overstepping its bounds lately. If you agree with the concept that distributing child porn harms the children over and over again, then the FBI itself is responsible for unimaginable amounts of harm to kids.
You're missing the part about this not being about them, but about unconstitutional search of *any* suspect. Just because these suspects are alleged to have committed particularly unpopular crimes does not mean a different set of rules applies. If the FBI uses child porn as the wedge issue to get precedent allowing unreasonable searches, we all suffer, not just the child porn consumers.
People who look at CP deserve everything that comes to them. Including malware
Define "Child Porn" for us.
Maybe it's just naked children? If that's the case, my parents should be in jail for life and then some.
On the other hand, I have seen very old photographs of pre-teen and teen girls that were just frolicking at the beach. They looked very happy. The name of the photographer escapes me, but outside of puritanical societies he's considered a great photographer. (DuckDucking for it is turning up nothing and I don't want to press it with Google or some other search engine that spies on people) I was at a gallery outside of the USA that doesn't have Byzantine laws written by repressed pedophiles and homosexuals that are out to prove something.
The photos were not in the least arousing in any sort of way and the children were hardly being exploited. It was just photographs of kids at play.
Some great art has naked children all over it. Some of them are called cherubs.
If the children are being hurt, we go after the producers. Going after consumers will be a never ending endeavor of whack-a-mole.
Now as far as porn where children are being victimized and abused, how about we solve the problem of HOW those children end up there in the first place.
But we won't America is all about being at "war" with symptoms of problems and not about actually solving them.
I believe their is a saying about this. It goes something like.
"For those who defend against unjust laws, they typically find themselves defending scoundrels as those are the one these unjust laws first target".
Basically it comes down to you either defend against an unjust law even when it is used against someone you hate because otherwise that legitimizes it and set the precedence to be used on you and others like you as well.
But the legal argument is shaky. Banks will put marked bills in a stack of money, so that if the bank gets robbed, they can hopefully track those marked bills back to the thief. What the FBI did here is very similar. They didn't trick anyone into visiting the site serving the CP, they merely marked the people that visited with some malware so they could be tracked down. They didn't issue a blanket warrant to search 8000 homes in the hopes of finding a crime. It would be the same as the police monitoring the home of a known drug dealer and recording the license plates of all the cars that pull up for a quick visit.
Not the same thing at all. The marked bill thing only comes into play after other collaborative evidence is revealed, like the video footage of the theft. Simply possessing the marked bill does nothing and even if you where handed a "hot" marked bill by a robber won't place you in the same legal boat that he is in.
Yes child porn is very bad, but our laws on unreasonable searches don't allow for blanket searches (by law enforcement, private security into a private venue is not the same, you can walk away from the door, not a police search). IMO, child porn and drunk driving are two subjects that america is playing with fire with the whole "these things are so bad they must supersede the constructional protections we all enjoy to stop it."
Sorry, Had to reply to myself. Actually something DID happen, a democratically elected government was ousted in Brazil, and a US backed GANG took power and Brazil is a MESS politically since 2014.
I'll make sure they add your name to the list of people to be tortured. I mean really. We all know the only people who use the term CP are paedophiles that look at that stuff.
The whole mantra of paedophiles being dangerous to children is little more than fear mongering by bigots and opportunists (media, politicians, prison industry, etc) to profit or otherwise make a name for themselves. They've blown the rare terrible tragedy of psychopaths raping and murdering little children into a "paedophile epidemic" totally ignoring the statistics and facts on the subject.
The majority of child rapists are parents, friends, and people close to families. Child rape is a crime of opportunity not paedophilia. There are certainly going to be some overlap just like there are men who rape, but most men are not rapists. It's easy to target paedophiles due to child porn and not so easy to target child rapists. Everybody involved in the fear mongering wins except the actual victims of rape. Nearly all of those on the sex offender lists (which came about from opportunists taking advantage of a story on a murdered child who was raped) are or were children or young adults and for which there were no actual victims. It consists largely of three categories: College students pissing in garbage cans outside of bars at 3AM that happen to be next to playgrounds/schools, children in awkward situations where one child lies about their age (13 year old says she 16 and has sex with 17 year old) to trick an older young person into having sex with them, and most of the other 1/3 are paedophiles who got caught with child porn. Few of these consist of actual rapists who pose a threat to anybody. On the other hand there is a small small percentage of those whom are rapists and that list is mostly made up of family, step-parents, friends, and similar.
Probably David Hamilton, who recently committed suicide under suspicion of having raped some of the underage girls he photographed decades ago. Perhaps not the best example to be used in defense of photographs of naked children.
Of course he's a witch! He wouldn't have been accused of witchcraft if he wasn't a witch. Stands to reason.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
People who look at CP deserve everything that comes to them. Including malware
To me, the key point is: can the FBI be dead certain that anyone who runs this malware got it from their salted CP images?No possibility that the malware could spread to innocent parties? No possibility that it could be contracted by someone who misspells a URL?
The bank is not the FBI. The bank isn't actively investigating you or attempting to persecute you. Many of the restrictions that prevent the governments from tracking their citizens do not apply to private companies for good reason.
In any case, the bank identify their product, they do not track the end user. This is more akin to the uploader watermarking the picture so it can be identified later when the FBI goes searching through files. This is very different from the FBI pretending to be a bank and saying: Here's your $50 and then ask you take it they drop a GPS into your pocket.
The other issue is the use of malware. They could easily have used it to plant evidence.
There is a danger of such tactics being used by others too. Imagine if Pizzagate had been enhanced by planting illegal material on servers and PCs owned by Democrats. Imagine if someone gets into Trump's Twitter account and posts a browser screenshot that happens to show a dodgy background tab along side the thing he wants to show, "by accident".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nope. A honeypot ends with the information that is wilfully given up.
A sting is a very specific and very targeted operation governed by very specific rules.
This is nothing like either of those. But hey if you know better I'm sure the ACLU would like to hear from you because I'm sure they wouldn't want to waste the money if someone is so sure that they will lose. I mean what do they and the EFF know.
OH NOES!!!! Somebody did something bad to a child somewhere! THIS IS AWFUL. Here, let me surrender all of my rights and freedoms so the nice men in their cheap suits can bring the wrongdoers to "justice." I mean, it's totally ok because they'll only ever go after evil kiddie porn hoarders, right?
This is a thing you'll hear about called "the slippery slope." A person who isn't interested in seeing the big picture and the long term game might see it a justifiable breaking of the law and basic due process. One thing you have to remember is that what is legal today might not be tomorrow. Just look at how the authorities have reacted to people criticizing the government in the United States in the past decade or so. It's easy to forget that there was a time when that wouldn't bring multiple federal agencies down on you like a ton of bricks.
Due process of law and constitutional protection applies to EVERYBODY, and there should not ever be any exceptions under any circumstances.
zOMG!! Won't somebody please think of the trees?
Spying on the population was a big driver behind the THIRD amendment:
While forcing the colonists to provide housing and upkeep for the soldiers sent to oppress them was an economic issue, there was more to it than that.
A soldier "quartered" in a colonist's house also served as a spy for the crown and its army. He eavesdropped on the conversations of the family and visiting friends. He had the opportunity to view their records when they weren't home (or even if they were). He reported anything suspicious to his unit. His presence inhibited getting together with others to hold private discussions, especially about opposing (by protest or otherwise) anything the government was doing. He was a continuous walking search, fed and housed by the people he was investigating.
It seems to me that law-enforcement and intelligence agency spyware, such as keyloggers and various data exfiltration tools, is EXACTLY the digital equivalent: It is a digital agent that "lives" in the home or office of the target. It consums the target's resources (disk space, CPU cycles network bandwidth) to support itself. It spies spying on the activities and "papers" of the target, reporting anything suspicious (or anything, actually) back to its commander, to be used as evidence and/or to trigger an arrest or other attack. It is ready, at a moment's notice, to forcefully interfere with, destroy, or corrupt the target's facilities or send forged messages from him.
Spyware is EXACTLY one of the most egregious acts (one of the "Intolerable Acts") that sparked the American Revolution. I'd love to see the Third brought back out of the doldrums and used against these "digital soldiers" the government is "quartering" inside our personal and private computing devices.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And if you do not defend the rights and freedoms of scumbags, pretty soon, nobody will have rights or freedoms. That is the thing so many idiots (like you) do not understand.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
First they came for pedophiles, then they came for me.
dammit, it wasn't meant to be a pun, it was meant to be an insightful commentary on how we can judge a society by how it treats the most despised and how they can use the same tools on the rest of us, dammit I did it again, I mean spy tools. Now because of you people and your twisted imaginations nothing can undo iterations of that pun from being in my head.
This is the problem with infringing anyones rights, it turns wisdom into a bad joke.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Indeed. There is nothing so bad that ignoring constitutional protections is a good idea. That is why these protections were created. Otherwise you end up with the "despicable crime du jour" being enough to not give people constitutional protection. It starts with CP, then there are a few steps, and then it becomes being gay, or having sex while not being married, or being an atheist or disagreeing with the government. That is exactly the reason why these limits on government power are not conditional.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Incidentally, the US military bombing children seems to be completely fine....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Given that they have demanded the extradition of British citizens who have spied on US government websites from their homes in the UK, logically the FBI can be charged with the same offence...