Illegal Hyperlinks

This article is scary in so many ways, that it gives one pause to even browse the Web anymore.

The gist of it all, is that the FBI put up some faked URL’s on a message board which they thought was being used for trading child pornography and then recorded the Internet Protocol (IP) number of any system which connected to their fake site. They made no distinction of how a person got the link, however. This means that someone could email the links in question to a person they want to damage, using misleading names on the links and cause a completely innocent person to find the FBI’s honeypot!

The FBI then took the IP information and traced it down to the supposed owner and used this to obtain a warrant for each location for dawn raids.

Let’s be blunt about this: when the FBI made no distinction on how someone got to the site, they engaged in utterly shoddy police work.

One of the most disturbing lines in the article is as follows:

Vosburgh faced four charges: clicking on an illegal hyperlink; knowingly destroying a hard drive and a thumb drive by physically damaging them when the FBI agents were outside his home; obstructing an FBI investigation by destroying the devices; and possessing a hard drive with two grainy thumbnail images of naked female minors (the youths weren’t having sex, but their genitalia were visible).

The obstruction and possession charges seem legitimate, but I have to ask, what the hell is an illegal hyperlink? What is the definition being used for this? If the hyperlink is illegal, can’t the FBI be charged for creating an illegal hyperlink?

Between this kind of questionable police tactics and the ongoing construction and use of data fusion centers, we’ve entered a whole new age of Orwellian existence. I would recommend to everyone to start encrypting everything, whether it is sensitive material or not. Make them waste time on trying to decrypt chocolate chip cookie recipes and text files that only have quotes of the Framers in them. Make them expend effort for nothing, so much effort that they become mired down under the weight of it all.

Following are links to various encryption tools.

http://www.gnupg.org/
http://www.truecrypt.org/
http://www.arg0.net/encfs
http://www.freeotfe.org/

And a page covering many drive encryption systems.