FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
1–10 of 20 posts
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#2"Clicking illegal hyperlinks". Just the term alone makes me want to weep.
Now that the site and possible URLs are made public, who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers?
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#3"Clicking illegal hyperlinks". Just the term alone makes me want to weep. Now that the site and possible URLs are made public, who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers?
Hope you didn't have prefetch on before reading the article!
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#4"Clicking illegal hyperlinks". Just the term alone makes me want to weep. Now that the site and possible URLs are made public, who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers?
> who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers?
Wouldn't that be a "good thing"? If the signal-to-noise ratio for this honeypot goes down and they end up investigating a bunch of innocent people, that should be enough for the practice to stop.
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#5"Clicking illegal hyperlinks". Just the term alone makes me want to weep. Now that the site and possible URLs are made public, who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers?
Hope you didn't have prefetch on before reading the article!
Or I hope you weren't building a search engine and running spiders from your home pc.
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#6"Clicking illegal hyperlinks". Just the term alone makes me want to weep. Now that the site and possible URLs are made public, who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers?
> who wants to bet this will the new, popular 4chan bait for random bypassers? Wouldn't that be a "good thing"? If the signal-to-noise ratio for this honeypot goes down and they end up investigating a bunch of innocent people, that should be enough for the practice to stop.
unfortunately, just clicking on the link means you are no longer innocent. If you click, you can get jailed for the act.
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#7Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this entrapment?
As I understand it, it's legal for the authorities to go buy marijuana, and then arrest the dealer. But it is not legal for them to sell marijuana, and then bust the people who buy it.
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#8Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this entrapment? As I understand it, it's legal for the authorities to go buy marijuana, and then arrest the dealer. But it is not legal for them to sell marijuana, and then bust the people who buy it.
read the article, it's discussed there at length.
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#9Entrapment and all the related legal discussions aside: there's a purely technical problem with the data used as evidence: no referrer data was collected.
In other words, the IP logs that the FBI is using only really indicate that someone followed a link. No information about link body text, alt text, title attributes can be inferred from these logs without any indication of context. The URL's themselves look pretty bad as well, but the evidence data doesn't really indicate what the user saw when they clicked the URL.
On top of this a whole host of issues around prefetching and content crawling could be raised, but I'm not even going there. But then it seems that probable cause is a pretty low barrier, so maybe you don't need much incriminating evidence anyway.
From the article: "When anyone visited the upload.sytes.net site, the FBI recorded the Internet Protocol address of the remote computer. 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."
Re: FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
#10Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this entrapment? As I understand it, it's legal for the authorities to go buy marijuana, and then arrest the dealer. But it is not legal for them to sell marijuana, and then bust the people who buy it.
No. They do not prosecute people based on clicking the link. They merely obtain a search warrant. They will prosecute people if they found any CP based on the search warrant.