March 20, 2008
Crime and Punishment Department
Click Here For an FBI Raid
There's no way this could possibly go wrong:
The FBI has recently adopted a novel investigative technique: posting hyperlinks that purport to be illegal videos of minors having sex, and then raiding the homes of anyone willing to click on them.
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.
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.
CNET is a tech news site, so they spotted the first thing I thought of:
There's no evidence the referring site was recorded as well, meaning the FBI couldn't tell if the visitor found the links through Ranchi or another source such as an e-mail message.
If that's true, then the FBI has no proof of why someone followed the link or what they thought it would get them. Anybody could have found one of those links and posted it to another web site with a misleading message such as "click here to see playful kittens."
Or imagine you're reading a forum or some blog comments, and you read a message that says "Oh my god, does this look like child porn to anyone? Should we tell someone?" Can you be sure you wouldn't reflexively click the link before thinking about it? Have you ever clicked a link by accident when you selected a window?
Anyone who followed one of those links could get raided by the FBI. That's a scary thought.
To be fair, in the case described in the CNET article, the posts by the FBI were very explicit about what was supposedly at the other end of the link, and the FBI servers recorded 5 clicks to 3 different files over a six hour period from the same IP address. That's more than just one reflexive click or a mousing error.
Nevertheless, this seems like a dangerous direction to take law enforcement.
(Hat tip: Crime & Federalism)
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