If you liked Rickrolling just wait for Raidrolling

[tellner]

A number of articles - I'm too lazy to supply links right now - outline the FBI's latest kiddie porn sting technique. They supply a URL which supposedly hosts illegal content. Anyone who clicks on a link to the site is told the site is not available. What visitors don't know is that they have just set legal wheels in motion. The FBI now has cause to raid their homes for the Federal crime of attempting to download child pornography.

Standard procedure in cases like this includes the removal of all electronic devices with computational capacity, all storage media, records of all electronic communications, paper records, books and so on. According to the Justice Department an undisclosed but significant number of such raids has already taken place, and there are prosecutions in the works.

I'm not going to discuss most of the legal issues involved or debate whether or not it's an appropriate use of law enforcement resources.

Consider how simple it is for one's entire life to get completely run through a tree chipper.

Consider Rickrolling where almost any link sends you to that annoying video.

Consider how many vindictive people live in cyberland and how many just plain thoughtless juvenile pranksters there are.

If the FBI doesn't end the program very soon I predict that a number of completely innocent people will be screwed, blued and tattooed when they inadvertently click a link for, oh, just about anything. Some time later at about four in the morning some very humorless men with even less funny search warrants and extremely serious guns break down their doors, and the legal bills rub up against the civil forfeiture and sex offender registries.

This is one where some bright boy in Washington didn't think through the fallout from his brilliant plan for easy convictions.

 

[mrhnau]

I read about this over on Slashdot and thought about writing up a post. What is scary is that they are simply using an IP address for their warrants. Until lately, I had an insecure wi-fi router. Well, suppose my neighbors like kiddy porn. Guess whose door they come knocking on! What about web crawlers? Search engines like Google tend to do a lot of crawling. Is Google a pedophile? Go after Sergey and Larry?

You are right about the prankster or someone with a vendetta. Suppose someone does not like you, but sends you a link claiming its to a CNN video or something, but in reality its to this site. You are screwed.

It's just messed up. While I'm no fan of kiddy porn, this type approach is a bit much.

 

[mrhnau]

The Slashdot Article

 

[Carol]

I don't think it will have an appreciable impact on crime.

It will increase the number of arrests on kiddie-porn related charges (which will be nice for someone's political statistics) but I don't think this will catch the sickos that really drive the demand for kiddie porn.

This could also have the effect of hurting law enforcement efforts. What if someone saw "click here for re@l k!dz pr0n" and did so....not because they wanted to look at porn but because they wanted to dime the bastards out? Talk about the road to hell being paved with good intentions....

 

[Andrew Green]

The whole set of rules around it seems screwy.

Consider this, I could embed a child porn image on this site, scaled down to a 1x1 image in the footer. No one would ever notice it. But, everyone that viewed a page, any page, anywhere on the site would have had the full sized image downloaded and saved in there internet cache. If you're computer where seized and that found, you'd be in trouble. You would never have even seen the image(s), yet they would be stored on your system, and you would very likely end up in court with a sex-offender label for life.

Child Porn is definately wrong, and people creating and distributing it should definately be punished, but with the way technology works the existance of such material should not constitute anything.

Or a more simple version, take the RickRoll, instead of a annoying music video, a innocent looking link takes you to illegal material, you immediately close the page, but everything there was downloaded and saved in temporary files. Or with the FBI's latest approach, I'm sure everyone here has at some point clicked a link accidentally, finger slipped, they missed, whatever it was, we all click on things we didn't mean to from time to time. If doing so can land you a jail sentence, that is a problem.

But, because it's "child porn", whenever someone does get busted, they will have very few defenders. No one wants to defend a pedophile, even if the issue is fuzzy on whether they intentionally had the material or not.

Not to mention that it makes unmoderated sites very dangerous to even browse. Usenet, the chans, just about anywhere. Even moderated sites don't act immediately. Suppose a malicious person signed up here, started posting illegal images. Even if the only person that sees them is the moderator who immediately deletes the thread and bans the user, that moderator has seen the material, and it exists on their hard drive, a week later they take their system into the shop, some overzealous technician sees the material while poking around (which they shouldn't be doing) and reports them. That moderator now has a big stack of problems for removing the material!

Posession alone, or following a link should not be enough to convict, there are all sorts of reasons why a person would do so without having illegal intentions. There are just too many ways for things to end up in a persons temporary folders without their knowledge, or by mistake. And the number of ways shoots up quickly if that persons system is compromized. IP addresses are not reliable because of things like wireless connections and other ways of having your IP address used without your knowledge.

 

[tellner]

Or a more simple version, take the RickRoll, instead of a annoying music video, a innocent looking link takes you to illegal material, you immediately close the page, but everything there was downloaded and saved in temporary files. Or with the FBI's latest approach, I'm sure everyone here has at some point clicked a link accidentally, finger slipped, they missed, whatever it was, we all click on things we didn't mean to from time to time. If doing so can land you a jail sentence, that is a problem.

Preee-cise-ly. It's kind of like randomly putting basilisks in cars, mailboxes, lunchboxes, glove compartments, coat pockets and refrigerators. Sooner or later you'll see one in normal everyday life. Then it's all over.

 

[DavidCC]

maybe everyeon should post thsoe 1x1 pix images on every site and forum where they can, and that way the feds will be so overcome with garbage data that they will have to abandon the program.

 

[Scarey]

maybe everyeon should post thsoe 1x1 pix images on every site and forum where they can, and that way the feds will be so overcome with garbage data that they will have to abandon the program.

Were that the case, the federales would just shut down all of the offending sites, and then get back to the matter at hand.