Read the bolded part a few times. Some asshole could put the link in a message board post or an email passed around the Internet or into the Javascript of a webpage and trick you into incriminating yourself as a pedophile. You don’t even have to click a link to be a winner. (Referer* headers can be forged via proxies, so even if the FBI did look at them it would still have been egregiously stupid. The fact they didn’t indicates either stupidity or something worse.) Shit, someone could forge packets so they appear to be from your computer and implicate you that way. There is absolutely no technical reason why they couldn’t.
*(It’s spelled “Referrer” in English and “Referer” in HTTP. Browsers speak HTTP.)
Judges consider this A-OK:
The Wi-Fi thing is fairly scary as well. Anyone who uses your Wi-Fi connection without your knowledge could be implicating you in who-knows-what. Used to be, though, the worst they could do was get you sued in one of the RIAA/MPAA’s scattershot “John Doe” copyright suits. Now they can convince the FBI to charge you with child pornography.
:eek: :eek: :eek: Has the sonic boom from the various rights orginizations jumping on this died down yet? Please tell me this will get overturned once the judge can be sat down and have this explained to them?!
This kind of crap is one reason I do NOT have WI-Fi set up at home. There are probably a dozen apartments around me that could leech bandwidth through any wireless base station I might own.
But still, the situation described by the OP is wrong.
How much cause is needed to justify a search warrant, Derleth? We need evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to convict someone of a crime, but what’s the level of evidence we need for a search warrant?
Unless I am mistaken, net accelerators function by automatically downloading information from the links on a page you haven’t even clicked on yet. That way, when you do click on them most of the information is already downloaded, making it appear that you have a very fast connection. That would mean that anyone with a net accelerator who visits one of the sites where the FBI dumped the dummy links would look like they were visiting the “child porn” sites.
So, running a net accelerator is enough to get the FBI knocking on your door with a search warrant. Ouch.
That someone at an IP address clicked on a link isn’t evidence of anything whatsoever, to any degree. The reference to rick rolling above is quite apropos.
Look, it happens on message boards all over the internet all the time. Even on this one. Someone posts a link that looks something like this: Click this! It’s just a funny cartoon! (Or whatever)
So you click it and it’s not at all a funny cartoon, but something else meant to startle you/annoy you/etc. Come on, man, you can’t have been on the internet more than two weeks without accidentally clicking some link you didn’t mean to. Sure, over the years you’ve learned to avoid clicking on such links, but you can’t say you never have.
It is evidence, but not enough, IMH-non lawyer-O, to grant a search warrant.
Why?
Well, there are reasons a person may click that sort of link that don’t mean they want kiddie porn.
For instance, I may see a link to something I think is questionable on this website. I could click that link, and then, if I found something ‘bad’ I would then report it to a moderator. I wouldn’t report a ‘suspected’ bad link because I don’t want to waste the moderators time.
Or I may see a link titled “see little kids have sex” and think that it is some sort of joke. Or I may wish to view the site and then notify the FBI. But since the link just goes to a dead page, without kiddie porn, I would not take any follow up action that would indicate that I was not after the kiddie porn.