[Kosh]

http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/03/20/2323247.shtml


Why is the FBI getting into this again?

[Admiral_Stones]

Appearently they are confiscating the stuff to jerk off to it theirself to remove the pedophile plague.

[karajorma]

And a new variant of rickrolling is born!

Hell if I'd included the link as a hyperlink in this post I bet I could have got at least a few people investigated by the FBI.

[achtung]

All the more reason to never follow tinyurls ever again.

[Dark RevenantX]

Oh ****.  Well, looks like my porn days are over.

[karajorma]

Only if you were downloading child porn or something else illegal.

For now.

[Mefustae]

Wow, i'm totally torn by this. I mean, on one hand you've got some scumbags doing something really, really wrong, and on the other you've got a bunch of pedophiles up to their usual shenanigans and getting just the right punishment. Is one evil battling a slightly darker shade of evil.

[Herra Tohtori]

Wow, i'm totally torn by this. I mean, on one hand you've got some scumbags doing something really, really wrong, and on the other you've got a bunch of pedophiles up to their usual shenanigans and getting just the right punishment. Is one evil battling a slightly darker shade of evil.

And you actually think this is going to have some effect on actual pedo rings? They have their closed newsgroups where they do their thing, no one gifted with independent thought should think for a second that even a percent of all the kiddie porn is distributed via normal web pages that have links to them from anywhere. There's been some discussion going on in Finland recently about the use of Internet censorship to prevent access to foreign child porn pages, and it's pretty interesting how the "would someone think of children" argument seems to be valid in driving through any inane law proposal in our parliament. As the end result, there are now several hundreds of web pages on the secret list of Finnish Central Crime Police (which isn't very secret at all because they distribute it to ISP's that can - for now - choose to block those pages or not), of which by estimation 99.96% are false positives.

Incidentally, the list was published in the pages of an Internet activist, and as the end result, that page was put onto the censorship list. Isn't it fascinating that even though the originally stated purpose of the list was to prevent access to foreign kiddie porn sites, a Finnish blog/opinion site ended up on the list...


At any rate, this... method... raises an interesting question. Because the FBI fake links can't contain illegal material, where's any proof that the cliker attempted to access illegal material anyway?

[Flipside]

Not only that, if the crime of attempting to download child porn is supposedly enforceable in that manner, then under the same mode of thinking, isn't the FBI guilty of attempting to supply child porn, considering the court is saying that the actual existence of the file is not required?

I'm pretty much with Mefustae here, I can understand the intention, but not happy with the reliability of the method used.

[Mefustae]

Not only that, if the crime of attempting to download child porn is supposedly enforceable in that manner, then under the same mode of thinking, isn't the FBI guilty of attempting to supply child porn, considering the court is saying that the actual existence of the file is not required?

I'm pretty much with Mefustae here, I can understand the intention, but not happy with the reliability of the method used.

Well when you think about it, it's not all that different from police posing as whores and arresting anyone who attempts to sample their wares. It's the same sort of thing we're seeing here, it's just the FBI is being a hell of a lot more insidious about it, not to mention the inherent reliability problems an entirely online-based initiative is sure to kick up.

[jdjtcagle]

Not only that, if the crime of attempting to download child porn is supposedly enforceable in that manner, then under the same mode of thinking, isn't the FBI guilty of attempting to supply child porn, considering the court is saying that the actual existence of the file is not required?

I'm pretty much with Mefustae here, I can understand the intention, but not happy with the reliability of the method used.

Well when you think about it, it's not all that different from police posing as whores and arresting anyone who attempts to sample their wares. It's the same sort of thing we're seeing here, it's just the FBI is being a hell of a lot more insidious about it, not to mention the inherent reliability problems an entirely online-based initiative is sure to kick up.

40 year old police officers are the same as children?  No, not the same.

Sometimes it takes a little wisdom to know when being insidious is a good thing.

[Mefustae]

40 year old police officers are the same as children?  No, not the same.

The general strategy is identical: Use a lure to draw out and capture scumbags. The idea being that it's pretty hard to deny it when you're caught red handed. Different media, different crime, but the same idea at heart.

Sometimes it takes a little wisdom to know when being insidious is a good thing.

Yes, I think we can all agree that child pronography/pedophelia is bad. Thanks for pointing that out. But how about we don't fall into the "think of the children!" mindset and blindly allow groups to get away with bloody murder because they protect kids. I'm not saying the FBI is blatantly crossing the line here, but the way they're headed has the definite potential to get real worrying real soon.

There have already been multiple recorded cases of persons of authority misusing government-allowed wiretapping for their own nefarious and corrupt ends, so it's not a stretch to think that a strategy as nebulous as what the FBI is trying here could be abused in a similar fashion.

[Stealth]

i'm with mefustae on this one...

and while sure, by far the majority of child pornography is probably deep underground, as it were, if they can find pictures posted by afghanistan terrorist groups that somehow leaked out, and trace those back, then i'm sure they can do the same thing here.

i think it's a good thing.

[jdjtcagle]

The general strategy is identical: Use a lure to draw out and capture scumbags. The idea being that it's pretty hard to deny it when you're caught red handed. Different media, different crime, but the same idea at heart.

So your problem is with the strategy?  Think about what they are doing again, they are not getting away with murder (although they may sometimes, I don't know).  I'm all for not letting the government control every aspect of my life and a little rebellious as-well, but just because the government is not being "politically correct" in their methods doesn't mean we should forget the bigger moral issue.

What your defending is a completely different narrow mindset.  We should "think of the children" regardless of which lens you put it through, honestly.

I agree that they will always find a way to make some kind of underground child porn AS-WELL as underground government policies. I don't think we should be critical over such a method of dishonesty, there is much at stake.

There is always going to be dishonesty - worry about protecting you, your family, and being happy.  Only when this is compromised (and to a degree "only this") should we be up in arms.

[karajorma]

As several people pointed out what is to stop someone simply posting the link elsewhere disguised as a link to something else?

Suppose that in the above posing as hookers example the police arrested anyone who stopped their car near their operative before they actually asked for sex. Sure you'd get a lot of people who hire prostitutes, but you'd also get people whose cars broke down at the wrong time and people on the way to shops or residences nearby.

To say someone wanted to commit a crime you need to prove intent and simply clicking on a link isn't really a high enough standard of proof for my liking.

[Herra Tohtori]

By the way, what does the US law (federal or defined on state-by-state basis?) say about incitement to crime?

[BloodEagle]

"Indeed. We're all ignoring the real issue here - does generating a search warrant in response to clicking a link violate the Amazon One Click Order patent..?"

 

Some really great comments are out there.

[karajorma]

Hmmm. Given that the FBI will remove large amounts of stuff from your house in the process of a search you could thereby call them a one click removal service. So possibly.

[MP-Ryan]

Couple things:

While many child porn rings are very careful about their access and sharing, there are many people out there whom we can classify as "The dumb ones."  These are the people the FBI is catching... the ones who aren't terribly smart about it, haven't been doing it long, and aren't the actual creators or perpetrators.  That said, they are still downloading and viewing child porn which is illegal and abhorrent.  So, I have no sympathy.

Second, while Slashdot and other news sources are great for posting brief summaries of law enforcement initiatives, they rarely (if ever) get a complete picture.  In my experience, there is usually a lot more to enforcement and intelligence activity than what gets reported in the media.  I would venture a guess that this is such a situation.  Most online "stings" conducted by the FBI and similar authorities have been reasonably complex and well-targeted affairs.  While checks and balances are undoubtably necessary, the number of false positives their operation will generate is likely quite low - this isn't going to be a matter of posting fake links in the wide public spaces of the internet; they will target online communities and known pornography sites with material that hovers on the fringe of legality in the first place.

It's a fairly safe bet that when they go through the effort of pulling ISP information and a search warrant, it's not going to be done lightly.

[Rictor]

/deletes History
/deletes Cookies
/encrypts folders

Welp, that takes care of that.