* Clicking on the wrong link now illegal
Topics: Civil Liberties
31 Mar 2008
From: Ervan Darnell
Dan sent me this, and I cannot do much more than pass it along as an outrage of the encroaching police state:
>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.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html?tag=nefd.pop
The penalty is to 3 to 4 years in jail for clicking on such a link.
Even for kiddie porn, that the act of clicking on a link is illegal is too much. And, of course, there wasn't any real kiddie porn to view. So, there was no crime, not an even an image of a crime, and it's illegal to click on a link that merely purports to lead to an image of a crime?
Beyond the entrapment aspect of a very low trip wire, how easy is it to click on a link absentmindedly? Not sure what it is even? Thinking it's something else (especially when internet-style abbreviations are used)? What if I'm running my own search engine which automatically indexes everything it can reach? It's now apparently a crime to even try to index a site that you have no specific knowledge of or intent to visit. Similarly, web strippers could trace down one of these verboten links without ever consciously intending to grab what it pointed to. How about reporters doing stories about what's on the web and tracking down links to see what's there? What's next, illegal to click on links pointing to pictures of bongs on Dutch servers? 90% of the stuff on the internet is bogus anyway. How can reasonably be assumed to agree with a what a link says just by clicking on it?
One defendant used the defense that his neighbors could have surfed in on his WiFi link. That's absolutely plausible. Indeed, were I interested in downloading kiddie porn, I would deliberately look for an open WiFi connection, or go to the local Starbuck's. Were one to grant this preposterous enterprise any merit, I guess I'd agree that clicking on a kiddie porn link is grounds for a search warrant, but not evidence by itself (see later in the article that the click was used as evidence in the trial).
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Ervan Darnell
ervan@kelvinist.com http://www.kelvinist.com
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