FBI honey pots are dangerous to everyone

According to Cnet News the FBI has recently used the technique of posting links that purportedly point to child pornography on forums that are supposedly visited by pedophiles . Using the allegedly incriminating IP addresses of those that clicked on the links, the FBI obtained warrants to raid and arrest people based on the federal law which makes attempting to download child pornography illegal. This federal law is punishable up to 10 years in prison.

The goal of finding and arresting pedophiles is something everyone can agree is a good one and the government should do everything it can within the law to catch them.

However, the disturbing thing about this is that the FBI does not have to even prove that the accused person actually clicked on the original link that the FBI posted on the forum which described the link as child pornography. Links that are posted on one website or forum are commonly reposted on other sites, or sent to other people by E-mail. On top of this are those that maliciously repost or E-mail these links with innocent descriptions about the link. Of course the re-posted or E-mailed link don't always include the original descriptions and links can be easily cloaked to make it appear that the link points to one website but takes you to another. This has even started a new term called "fedrolling" which is similar to "rickrolling" except that the link the victim is tricked into clicking on lead to an FBI honey pot.

A court judge ruled that the possibilities that someone spoofed the accused person's IP address or someone without permission used the accused person's open Wi-Fi connection would not be a basis to negated probable cause for a warrant. The techniques is not considered entrapment because there is no supposed pressure by the government on the person to click on the link.

The boom of popular social networking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and others has made the spreading of links even faster and the chance of inadvertently clicking on such a link much higher. Even without cloaking the link, if such a link is posted innocently or maliciously on such a social network site it could easily spread to many people and clicked on by them before the link is removed from the social networking site.

Using such a honey pot link method is sloppy, and ignores the dynamics of the internet. There are better ways to find and arrest people involved in such sick practices. Continued use of such methods will probable lead to innocent people's lives being seriously damaged and if the warrants are later overturned by a court as illegal, it could lead to guilt people being release where they can continue to victimize children

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