You mistake my meaning. I mean that he tends to treat the law as Scripture in the sense that all the Truth is therein written, that no reasoning applies that is not directly derived from the written law. I am sure friend Bricker has several law books, I doubt that he burns incense while he reads them. I think it would be totally cool if he did, but I doubt it.
But to leap from a unfortunately cramped textualist approach to the law to one willing to enable the machinery of genocide is, shall we say, a bit of a stretch. Rather a large one, actually. And your reference to his history ignores the great progress he has made in lurching from the path of political error. We have great hope for him. Well, some.
WiFi hijacking is by no means the only way your IP address could be associated with child pornography. Rickrolling is the other obvious way, as are somewhat more subtle technological measures (zero-sized frames, Javascript trickery, hotlinking of image elements, etc.) that amount to the same thing. That is nowhere near a complete list. It barely scratches the surface of the most plausible methods.
And there is no way to ensure the real pedophiles are associated with all of the hits the honeypot gets. Tor is an acronym for “The Onion Router”, a service and a piece of software that allows people to use the Web anonymously by sending strongly encrypted packets from the user’s computer through a complex network based on deniability (more on this later) to an exit node, whereupon it is decrypted and travels to its destination. A pedophile accessing the honeypot using Tor would, according to the FBI’s lights, strongly implicate the person running the exit node and not implicate himself at all.
Deniability refers to the fact there is no technical way, even under penalty (sub poena), to trace the communication beyond the exit node. Should all people running Tor exit nodes be subject to random search and seizure?
If you’re allowing your computer to forward child pornography or other illegal material, then yes. The whole “anonymous P2P” and “plausible deniability” thing is complete bullshit. Willful ignorance is not a defence.
Again, for the umteenth time, the issue is probable cause.
You make the conscious choice to run a Tor exit node. If your node is used to transmit illegal materials, then yes, congratulations, you’ve just given probable cause for search and seizure of your system – and it ain’t “random”, either.
Similar defense was made by Napster and tose of that ilk, with wide-eyed innocence: “We don’t share anything illegal, we just make sharing available.” It didn’t save them, and it wouldn’t save a Tor exit node operator from attention. There are, IIRC, less than 1,000 Tor exit nodes right now.
At least for me, and probably many others, I think it’s pretty clear that this isn’t outside the scope of probable cause, and admittedly I wouldn’t begin to have any idea how to better refine the legal definition of it nor do I have the education or understanding to even debate what it should be.
However I think there’s a certain amount of dismay people are feeling because this hits closer to home than in other scenarios where similar levels of suspicious activity are used for probable cause. I’ve never been the target of a malicious anonymous tip, nor do I hang out near shopping malls at night wearing dark clothes, or do just about any other thing that seems likely to earn an arrest or search warrant.
But, quite a lot of us have been tricked into clicking on something “nasty” as a prank, and a lot of us have visited a web forum or blog with inline images/video enabled where some poster maliciously posts 57 variations of goatse and lemonparty. While I’m sure the FBI Goatse Special Crimes Unit isn’t looking for me as a result, what I’m discovering is that law enforcement and judges may view server logs as “probably” indicating that I knowingly clicked a link to said material. This is a tad surprising to me even though it is legally sound, because occasionally getting an eyeful of something unpleasant has been a not-uncommon experience over the last few years of the internet.
The implication here is that if I click on a forum page that inlines 20 images and 5 videos of child porn because of a disgruntled poster “going out in a blaze of glory”, this means that people who are less technically aware (which apparently includes the FBI, judges, the news media, and otherwise intelligent forum posters) will assume that I “clicked a link to child porn 20 times, and clicked on (and downloaded!) 5 full videos”. That assumption is silly, my browser made requests for inline content and I didn’t click anything. But as they say, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Trying to get people to understand how your browser made those requests against your will is going to be difficult at best.
It’s just a little unsettling, because prior to this case being publicized I think many of us would not have realized how close to probable cause we were on a day to day basis. Of course, if, as you’ve said already, this sort of evidence is used for a conviction, it would move from “unsettling” to “outright ridiculous”.
I think that as these kinds of cases continue, we’ll see a sharper cognizance on the part of magistrates. For instance, I think it’s relevant to the issue of probable cause how long the honeypot link is in existence. If I create a fake kiddy porn page and publish it to a newsgroup known for its interest in such things, and a get multiple hits from the same IP address six minutes, I don’t have any heartburn with saying probable cause has been established. If it’s a week later, that’s plenty of time for the links to have filtered their way into scenarios such as the one you describe.
According to your argument, then, the world’s most prolific child pornographer is Google.
So are you willing to be one of those cases, in order to further the court’s education on these matters? How dangerous to your career would an FBI raid and accusation of child pornography be to your career and life?
This story demonstrates how easy is to click on a fake link. I really feel sorry for that guy.
That’s a good example, but for what it’s worth, smart users can work around it. Tinyurl offers a preview feature, which shows you where the link goes before you click on it.
Basically, you tell Tinyurl you want previews, and it’ll set a cookie on your machine to interrupt the parsing of the destination link before it gets resolved. That lets you check things out before loading the page.
However, I would wager that the overwhelming majority of users is unaware of this, and will blithely click the Tinyurl link without consideration of the potential consequences, and as such it offers an excellent demonstration of the risks inherent in drawing conclusions from simple link-clicking.
I’m going to have to come down on Bricker’s side at this point. There’s a big difference between clicking on a link labeled New Paris Hilton Video and getting a kiddy porn vid and clicking on a Hot 8yo Sex link and getting a file that turns out to be “corrupted”. And then downloading it again. And again. One is probable cause and the other is a sick joke. Arguments that your computer was zombied or that your WiFi was hijacked are properly addressed before the judge at which time a computer forensics expert will or will have already examined your computer(s) for evidence.
Re: TOR. TOR is publicly known and available. I’d speculate and bet money that there are many botnets serving the same function without anyone having signed up to be an exit node. The premise behind a zombie computer is that the owner of it has no idea that they’ve been compromised.
**Bricker ** is thinking and speaking as a lawyer. As far as the practice of law is concerned, if there’s precedent saying that clicking something is probable cause for the issue of a search warrant, then that’s not really up for debate.
What he’ll likely challenge is something about the admissibility of evidence, and/or bring experts to testify as to the ease of hacking wi-fi, net accelerators’ pre-caching, and of a sort of more sinister Rick-roll (deliberate joke sending of the link).
What you guys are arguing is about whether or not it should be probable cause based on a number of valid points. **Bricker’s ** seeing the issue as moot because it’s already been decided- challenging it would be pointless at the ‘probable cause’ stage.
(I’m married to a lawyer and I get into this kind of argument all the time with my wife- I bring up an argument against something, and her style of answer is very much like Bricker- it’s somewhat philosophical, but all squarely in terms of the law and how it’s applied.)
Yes, and that’s precisely the problem Bricker is running into. Outside of courtrooms or legislature, attempting to constrain a discussion of law to within the law itself is at best missing the point, and at worst fallacious. Apologies ahead of time for the length of this reply; my goal is to use rigor rather than rhetoric to bridge the gap between the sides of this discussion.
The law, for as much history, power, thought and support as it has behind it, is ultimately a human construct. It is a set of written rules based on human decisions, some new, some centuries old. New decisions are made with an eye toward consistency with the old ones, hence the concept of legal precedent; for this reason, the law can be said to be logical system of sorts.
I’d like to make an analogy, then, to another type of logical system: mathematics. Suppose I were to invent a mathematical system under which I proved, say, the Riemann hypothesis, using logical steps valid within the system. A colleague then studies the rules of my system, and uses it to develop a logically valid proof that 2 = 1. Other mathematicians would then, quite understandably, begin to discuss the validity of my system, based on the fact that humanity is aware that “2 = 1” is false. They are able to do this because my system is a human construct, and they, as humans, are able to step above it and recognize that a proper system should not be able to prove this.
Suppose I then enter that discussion and attempt to support my point by providing reams of additional proofs of Riemann, and one of the Hodge conjecture as a supporting point, using my system. It doesn’t matter if I do this, because no one is saying that my system does not prove these things; what is being discussed is the validity of the system itself. The whole discussion takes place above the system.
So it goes with arguing from legal principle in this thread (and others like it). The OP, and the majority of his supporters, are in essence arguing that “clicking a particular hyperlink is a valid reason for a police search of one’s home” is the “2 = 1” of the matter…a notion that, above the system of law, they believe to be true. If clicking a link is believed not to be sufficient reason for a police search, then anything the concepts of probable cause or legal precedent have to say about the issue is altogether irrelevant. As in my hypothetical, within the system, we KNOW “what is”. The question at hand is “what should be”.
The phrase “no one is above the law” is often interpreted too literally. Philosophically speaking, everyone is above the law. Humans created it, and humans have the ability to change or even entirely reject it – with no need to work within the system to do so (see: Russia, 1917; France, 1789; USA, 1776) – if they believe it to be inherently flawed. Barring such measures, they certainly have the means to discuss it outside of its own boundaries. Such is the nature of this thread, and that’s why Bricker’s argument is falling flat.
That said, Bricker, I – and many others, I’m sure – would be very interested to know your thoughts on the issue outside of the context of law. Your wealth of intelligence and reason is plain to see from your posts, and it saddens me that you often choose to constrain your arguments in this manner. Speaking not as an attorney, but as a person, do you feel that having visited a particular URL should be sufficient to allow a search warrant?
Luckily for us all, I’m not aware of any instances in which a signal click of a URL, without other corroborating evidence, has ever led to the issuance of a search warrant.
Clicking a single link, once, shouldn’t serve to establish probable cause. I don’t know what elaboration beyond that you’re looking for. That’s what you asked, and what seems to be pegging the outrage meters here.
Clicking on a link multiple times, actually downloading a file, these start to get us into probable cause territory comfortably.