AskLG

As technology grows and the internet becomes more intertwined in our society’s culture, the FBI feels it must use this to its advantage to find law breakers.  This is a reasonable assumption, assuming they are within legal bounds to catch the criminals in the act.  Over the years, some groups have formed to combat child pornography, such as the ASACP.  Child pornography still exists on the internet and is available for download by any random individuals who wish to obtain it.  Yes, the good side hasn’t won yet.

To combat this, America’s wondrous, law abiding (ha!) investigative organization, otherwise known as the FBI, has decided to use a new technological concept to catch these perverts in the act of trying to obtain online child pornography.  The FBI  has concocted and staged (fancy term for hosted a website) their own child porn websites which log access attempts.  Agents then trolled message boards and chat rooms alike placing links to “Child Porn” as bait for unsuspecting individuals.  One of these individuals, Roderick Vosburgh, clicked on the link and is now being sentenced for trying to obtain child pornography online.  The FBI used the link as a crutch to get the conviction.  Thats fine, one more pervert behind bars, right?  Not exactly.

Like Ars Technica reported,  anyone can be RickRoll’d into going to these staged servers.  For those who’ve never heard of Rick Rolling, basically you send a link to someone saying something completely different than the link takes you to.  For example, I can send you a link titled: Nikki Jean.  You click on it thinking you’re about to see a music video or one of her daily videos, and you end up at some random disgusting video or worse (government-owned child porn site)!  Well you clicked on the link, so you go to jail for 10 years!  Thats the basis and all it takes for a conviction.

Obviously this leads us to a few other technological tactics.  Spam mail seems to be a prime place for some government placed links.  A government owned botnet would be pretty annoying.  How about some fake torrents on The Pirate Bay?  They already even have agents trolling AIM and chat rooms to talk to people for years waiting on someone to do something illegal.

If this trend continues, eventually you wouldn’t know if this blog is actually run by me or the government.  We might not be able to tell free-willed news from government influenced reports.  We could eventually become as paranoid as China.  Obviously this is an exaggeration, but it makes you think how far the government can go to trick individuals into doing something illegal.  It also makes me wonder how little evidence they need for a jury to pass a criminal judgment.  Have we become that much of a negative society thinking everyone is guilty of something illegal?  Where’s the love?

Tags: aim, chat room, child, FBI, game, pornography, rick rolled, roderick vosburgh, tech, vosburgh

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:46 pm and is filed under William. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.