Battleangel

The FBI is increasingly resorting to “rickrolling” internet users by putting up fake content to snare what they claim to be presumptive criminals.

These pranks are commonplace now, but be careful of what you click on and from whom. If that link points to anything even pretending to be child porn, that’s enough evidence for the FBI of intent to download it. The authorities could then raid your home and possibly throw you in jail. No joke, it just takes one click and you’re under intense suspicion.

Vosburgh eventually went to trial and was convicted of clicking on an illegal link and possession of child porn due to two tiny thumbnails that the FBI believes depict underage females—this is despite the testimony from multiple computer experts saying that the cache was created automatically and Vosburgh had no idea how or where to find these thumbnails on his machine.

It boggles the mind. But that is just the sort of society we have voted ourselves into. And the motives for the government to invent crime are well known by now. At the end of the day, it is the only certain insurance against their own extinction. Considering the poor foundations upon which this whole idea was constructed it is not surprising that the machinery of repression eventually chose to expedite the matter and skip a few steps. It sure as hell doesn’t matter to them who is convicted as long as the quota is met and the rationale for the laws in question can be backed up with irrefutable numbers.

The really “paranoid” among us will surely theorize that this is part of a broader attack on the unregulated Internet itself. By instilling fear and making people move more carefully in the wired realm, much of the spirit of the net is effectively negated. In time, users may start to flock to sanitized, approved and effectively balkanized networks. And to recap, the child porn scare has also provided ample reason for hands-on censorship of the Internet in countries where censorship was previously unheard of. Sweden is a good example of this. After a while, the same idea was tested against file sharing. Both in terms of implying the existence of “child porn” on torrent trackers and in terms of applying the same sort of DNS blocks to the same torrent trackers. In the end, justice and sanity won the day, but we have hardly seen the last of this assault on the net.