Click on the link, knock knock.

In looking for the graphic on this posting, I ran across a number of fringe organizations and people whose sights I might not normally find myself at. This is not all that unusual when you enter a series of words - like "thought crime" in to the google images search.

Keep this in mind, and also think about how many times you have found yourself in a site that might be considered illegal or immoral by the standards found in the local community.

Enter the DOJ. From a news.com article:

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.

Two things quick. First, players in the kid porn world deserve the wood chipper. Second, that 'gibberish' was probably a nice attack vector with call back code in it.

Regardless, think about what is going on here. Someone connected to a linking using the IP address registered to your account with the ISP - maybe it is you, maybe not - and accesses a link watched by the FBI. On the strength of this information alone, your door gets kicked in and you are accused of a crime to which you really have no chance of defending yourself against.

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.

With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account--and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids.

What troubles me about this (besides the nature of the accusation) is fairly complicated. First the person did not actually access illegal material. In a more traditional (say drug related) situation, you must exchange money for drugs before a crime takes place. Here a link is accessed from some IP address. There is no strong causality - either in terms of who did the access (remember, we only have records for the internet address, not the person) and more importantly the fact that the transaction never actually took place. Nothing illegal was accessed - only 'gibberish'. In addition, how the address accessed the link was not recorded (as per the quote above), so there is no indication of what means the illicit link was accessed by - say in an email or web site or even as an image referral in a particularly broken email client.

In addition, it is not unusual to have legal precedent created for a crime like drug use or porn where there are few people who look at this as a potential civil rights infringement. Hell, they are happy to see that sort of asshole locked up no matter what the means. The problem is, such legislation tends to suffer from feature creep.

When asked what would stop the FBI from expanding its hyperlink sting operation, Harvey Silverglate, a longtime criminal defense lawyer in Cambridge, Mass. and author of a forthcoming book on the Justice Department, replied: "Because the courts have been so narrow in their definition of 'entrapment,' and so expansive in their definition of 'probable cause,' there is nothing to stop the Feds from acting as you posit."

It is not the individual described case that concerns me as much as the big picture. There is a layer of abstraction happening here which seems a bit slippery. It is not the notion that intent is irrelevant - think about conspiracy charges. It is the lack of causality between the act of someone accessing an internet site, and the FBI kicking in your door and dragging you away in front of your neighbors. You are not just accused of a crime that is poison in our society, but also having the FBI dig through your personal items and papers:

The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any "computer-related" equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any "addressed correspondence" sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements.

You tend to get this stuff back when they are quite ready to give it to you.

It is the feature creep that is causing me the most grief.