FBI Uses Fake Hyperlinks To Trap Child Porn Thinkers
IN America, the FBI is rooting our paedophiles by, as CNET reports, “posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.”
You can be accused of looking at child porn even when you haven’t – unless the FBI is posting actual images of depravity on its honey-trap? And, then, how does the FBI know who was using the PC at the time? You can have your home raided for what the police think you might do. The FBI are now clamping down on thought crimes.
Undercover FBI agents used this hyperlink-enticement technique, which directed Internet users to a clandestine government server, to stage armed raids of homes in Pennsylvania, New York, and Nevada last year. The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images.
Armed raids for not looking a picture or video but thinking of looking at a picture or video. And it’s because it’s online. If you were, say, in a bookshop and looked at a picture of a naked minor, is that downloading the image to your brain?
Has that image now opened your mind to sickness, a gatweway image to criminality you will enact.
A CNET News.com review of legal documents shows that courts have approved of this technique, even though it raises questions about entrapment, the problems of identifying who’s using an open wireless connection–and whether anyone who clicks on a FBI link that contains no child pornography should be automatically subject to a dawn raid by federal police.
What I you wer looking at cartoon images, drawing that do not depict an actual child coming to harm? Has a crime been committed?
Roderick Vosburgh, a doctoral student at Temple University who also taught history at La Salle University, was raided at home in February 2007 after he allegedly clicked on the FBI’s hyperlink. Federal agents knocked on the door around 7 a.m., falsely claiming they wanted to talk to Vosburgh about his car. Once he opened the door, they threw him to the ground outside his house and handcuffed him.
In the Land of the Free…
Embryonic Child Porn In Dakota And Thought Crimes
Britain Against Free Speech: Blogger Threatened With Prison
Tesco Thought Police Ban Mum From Buying Alcohol With Teen Daughter
Naked Bart Simpson Is Paedophilia And Child Porn
Thought Crimes And Adultery In Second Life
Church Warns On The Perils Of Inhaling Gay Men
Is Waxing Lyrical About ‘Terrorist’ Samina Malik A Crime?
Thought Police Take UK Driving Tests
Posted: 27th, March 2009 | In: Media Comments (5) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
Comments
March 27th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
a deep packet inspection, eh Magnetite? - that sounds highly dodgy all on its own….
March 27th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
I was just about to mention all that myself, especially the onion-skin thingy
March 27th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
The only thing to fear is fear itself, yampster? If fear wasn’t so terrifying, that wouldn’t be a problem. Behavioural conditioning at the flesh-machine analogue-digital convergence in action here?
I do wonder at their methods though, and if they involved ‘deep-packet inspection’ at the ISP side. Otherwise, blocking your browser from sending useragent, referring page and system information (as well as all scripts and cookies) and going in through an onion-skin proxy (or even using a custom rendering engine) would mean that even the real deal may get off scot-free. This would trap the unwary and internet neophytes, but it’s the clever criminals we need to get to. Be they sex-offenders, fraudsters, pirates or hackers…and Plod playing Tom Clancy probably isn’t the way to do it unless their own black/grey-hat hacking skills are mighty.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Of course the scam may be set within a scam. The FBI hyperlinks need not exist. They only need to be thought to exist by potential browsers for them to worry enough not to do it. Every ‘legitmate’ porn site will be suspect from now on.
March 27th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I assume that this was meant to obviate troubling the judiciary for court orders for ISP traffic records (after the fact) for a given user and the resultant lawyer-off that would ensue. CNET’s story had little detail on the mechanics of how these stings played out. It would have to have been a multi-layered honey-trap though, with an escalating level of involvement and interest shown from the target (if particular users were targeted) and opportunities given to discontinue the link trail - or it will wind up in a lawyer-off anyway, probably without convictions.
A laudable, if misguided, effort from the authorities then. If it wasn’t a completely secret operation (avoiding leaks from peripherally involved staff, and a fast operation over a short time-scale on secure servers) then the opportunities for misuse were too high for comfort and any legitimate convictions gained likely tainted as a result. The operation should have been as clean as a whistle, all the way down the line from genesis to execution. Imagine someone with the text of the hyperlink in their possession rick-rolling an enemy or rival into a click that they think goes elsewhere. Once ISP records had been subpoenaed at trial (or pre-trial, if that’s possible - I don’t think Matlock covered this) and the rick-roll discovered, then it would be too late for the defendant to save their reputation, family life or worse.
I hope the FBI did use an escalating involvement technique via an already suspect (but not obviously paedophilia-related - say extreme pornography, for instance) website or forum, else their hard work will go to waste. No matter the validity of the methods involved.