be very careful out there, fellow tubians. fake pr0n or fake terror, one never knows if our predatory gov’t is after you.

……………..started several weeks ago. Despite my cable connection speed staying the same according the McAfee test loading the following sites take around ten times longer:

FDL
HuffPost
TPM
C&L
MyDD

Corrente no prob, No Quarter likewise…no problems on the many small sites I visit.

Interesting, eh?

A. Citizen

Peace, Health and Prosperity for Everyone.

i’m heartsick. what more must we do to be in the Club? we say “fuck” a lot. and we like some arab and middle eastern people. isn’t that enough to make the list?

/runs away heartbroken/

if my cat walks on the keyboard or changes position while sleeping on my desk, moving the mouse to some illegal site?

What is I request images on some topic and something untoward is in those pages of images? And unopened thumbsnaps being proof of illegal activity? WTF? Who can even tell what’s on most of those (but then I don’t wear my reading glasses…). And others using one’s wifi? Eeeek!

Now, I’ve never been to a site like the chat room mentioned—that I know of—but in the past I do recall porno sites coming up. Hasn’t happened in a long time—has something been improved in regulating ad links…or something?

Weird. Infuriating. And scary.

That’s what you’re trying to say, CD?

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

it is a scary story jawbone. but no scarier than being whisked off to a secret prison because someone you don’t know names you a terrorist to our gov’t.
that happens to americans too.

they’ll trip up some famous bloggers with this though, if they’ve a mind too. this is just the internet version of what they do in entrapment situations like those poor “terrorists” fools from FL a while back.

as far as i can tell, or of reversing any of this shit.

A few weeks back Chris Floyd’s site was victimized by some really persistent hackers who redirected it into a “Turkish anti-terrorist” site. Today you can’t get into it either, only his back-up blogspot site.

One could imagine, when the Company and/or their private contracting minions [who like to see their prisons full], decides It’s Time for more soylent green, that they hack a political site they’re hostile to, and redirect visitors to an FBI cyberporn link.

During Viet Nam, it happened that the cops would plant pot on people to bust them. It occurs to me this is far simpler, and guaranteed to get the home folks salivating for the blood of the set-up perps.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

One hears rumors, but I never could find anything definitive. My circle then there was no need to plant, dope was everywhere. The poor undercover saps we had in and around were forever trying to avoid the floating joints, claiming allergy or whatever, but it made them stick out like a Mormon at a beer blast. Then we’d take them aside to feed them some more bullshit - double-top secret - and wait until they made excuses and left to report in on the latest threat to pour LSD into city water supplies, while we fired up another doobie and laughed our asses off.

Fun times.

Good news, I think you all have made the watch list because you’ve crashed my browser several times today!

……and there could be another explanation. Exodus. The millions driven from their accustomed community by Lord Kos or Duke Bowers or ArchDeacon Marshall. Their attemtps to ’get in’ at the sites listed could be part of the problem. TalkLeft has has mentioned having to upgrade their servers and mess with their layout to handle the load but of course that will only last until folks get wise to BTD.

How’s dat ’Boma thing werkin’ fer ya Kos? What say you to getting crushed by McSame?

Think that will ’advance the progressive agenda….’?

A. Citizen

Peace, Health and Prosperity for Everyone.

Links? Who believes links?

I know I don’t.

I have heard anectdotes. Total hearsay. Like you, during the 70’s I was usually too busy covering my own ass (and my friend’s) to tell if any contraband was planted or not.

I do remember some instances when police type individuals came looking for things they shouldn’t have known about, only to find that my compulsive paranoid fan dance had covered tracks. And that’s all you’re going to hear about that story, amigo.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

during the anti-Vietnam War days. Would explain a couple of stashes I found but didn’t remember hiding. Could be other reasons for that having happened, I suppose. The not remembering part….

I guess there were some sucessful infiltrations but in the 60’s with my crowd we all pretty well knew each other and anything sensitive was kept close to the vest. The spies were pretty clumsy, actually, and not that difficult to spot. They must have been shorthanded for a while, we had one hanger-on who got laughed out for asking too many leading questions, only to show up again six months later with longer hair and a new beard. What an insult.

The real worry was that someone you knew and trusted would get turned, lucky me that didn’t happen until after I’d walked away from the crazy kids. By the 70s I’d gotten out of Dodge and was retired from sneaky stuff, got way too scary out of control for my taste. Haven’t had anyone with a blue suit and broad shoulders stop by for a chat for over 20 years now, and I hope it can stay that way.

Thanks for keeping your details to yourself, have my own burdens and don’t need any more. Whatever’s already in the file, no sense adding to it.

they have and of course i’m sure i don’t have to tell you BIO that they do it to poor and urban folks all the fucking time, today.

i was a twinkle in the eyes of my parents during the heydays of the late 60s, but they have shared some stories. if anything, i think it’s much worse now. back then you all weren’t fighting against the republican metanarrative of “the drug war” and all the propaganda that goes with it. these days, all drug users are instantly suspect, and if you’ve been busted for something simple like a joint, it’s exactly 0 steps in many peoples’ minds that you must then also be a major coke supplier.

i hate the fact that people can’t tell the difference between drugs and drug use types. nor do they understand how many gov’t officials use, sell, buy, ship and profit from the drug trade. as someone was just pointing out about another racially charged topic, it’s always easiest for our gov’t, press and low-information types to believe that drugs = niggers = chaos = need for strict law enforcement and no civil rights…but only in those neighborhoods, of course.

files in the State Dept—they’re reporting it on MSNBC..

using our govt as a branch of the GOP for oppo research yet again. no surprise.

it’s not a crime unless they pass the info on (which is unprovable), and they never referred it to DOJ.

Ah…unity—with these criminals.

Rove consulting? ; >

and Obama brought it to the media’s attention just now—hmmm

Unauthorized passport data access is a crime, a misdemeanor. Unauthorized disclosure is a felony.

State called Obama just today to notify him.

Back to pot planting. Yes, CD, planting drugs does happen, as well as other evidence. It isn’t common. One case is too many, but still; the major causes of wrongful conviction are more incompetence and systemic bias rather than manufactured evidence. Both need to be stopped.

Decriminalizing personal use drug possession would put an end to that tactic. Here in CA, less than an OZ of pot is a $100 fine, big deal. Do the same for other drugs, IMHO, and make treatment freely available and we’d solve a lot of problems. Plus jobs and stuff like that.

Or, a la the LAPD in Michael Connelly’s book, a digital throw-down.

For example, some encryption technology is legally categorized as munitions. What if you clicked on one such link?

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

because i can’t link to my own personal experience as a child of an officer of the court. if wish i had records of what i’ve seen and heard from the inside, but i don’t. you just go on trusting your Court Officers and police forces are Sober, Honest and have Integrity. Go on now, honey. /pat head/

but i can’t not respond to what you say:

Yes, CD, planting drugs does happen, as well as other evidence. It isn’t common.

and all i can say is, “um, sure. dood.” it’s not ’common.’ for you, perhaps. it’s just…regular enough to inspire whole regionally-focued corruption-focused blogs and ministries and church actions and protests and…but never mind. it’s not “common.” you’re so right:

always trust the cops. they love you and only want to love you more. never doubt what they tell you. they would never rape my friends, or jail them, or harrass them, or surveil them without cause.

never. that would never happen, and you should never believe, say, the cousin of a supreme court justice with a stupid blog and a benched judge father and various other elected/political relatives, when she suggests she knows, “what it really means.” never.

And I’m not arguing all is well, especially over the internet the law is a mess. But as the article you originally cited points out, a deceptive link would be entrapment.

All the FBI got out of the link they put out - on a chat room known for internet distribution of kiddie porn - was a search warrant. If the subject had been clean, he would have been inconvenienced to be sure - and there’s an argument there about fairness, no question - but there would have likely been no prosecution and very unlikely to have been a conviction. But what does our boy do? First thing when he sees it’s the FBI, he trashes his hard drive; hardly the act of an innocent man.

It’s called consciousness of guilt and it is very powerful in front of a jury. They will almost always find a way to convict under circumstances where the accused tried to hide evidence. Often it isn’t the crime, but the coverup.

Internet law is a mess. We need to do better. Still, find me someone who isn’t a kiddie porn collector and I’ll work up more sympathy for limiting this kind of thing.

I click on the link.

Suddenly, the burden of proof is on me to prove I’m not trapped, right?

I could try to prove that by:

1. Releasing my entire browsing history, assuming they haven’t got it already.

2. I could let them paw through all the rest of my records.

And that’s without even raising the issue of politicization.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Somewhere between “never” - a position I did not take, eh? - and “common” is a lot of ground.

It happens that evidence is planted on a suspect. It is always wrong.

How often it happens will vary from place to place and time to time. But my larger point, which you skipped right over, is that wrongful convictions are less the result of on-the-scene planted evidence and more from systematic failures; cops and prosecutors and judges who tunnel vision and drive a conviction regardless of the evidentiary fit, forced plea-bargain convictions and incompetent or corrupt evidence processing, where the techs just put out whatever the cops want to hear. These have been the big Chicago problems, far more than evidence planting.

I don’t trust anybody all the time, so save the head pats. I do want to keep focus on the problem, and death by gunfire - where we started this, remember? - is seldom the result of the police. That’s the claim I asked for data to support. Bunch of gangstas shooting up the hood is the result of a lot of things, not the least of which is the stupid ass behavior of a bunch of idiot gangstas in the hood.

Poverty, jobs, education, health care and - brace yourself - hope are helpful solutions for urban gun violence, not blaming the cops. You want better cops, pay them more and give them better training - just like for everyone else.

Always is. In your scenario, assuming you aren’t cruising a chat room already commonly used for criminal hookups and all you do is link on, maybe poke around for a few minutes and then realize whoopsie and log off, you may well get a visit and a conversation but there will not be a conviction or even likely a prosecution. Still a pain in the ass, but like I said it is murky and for kiddie porn most people will want the law to err on the side of caution. Other topics more clearly alligned with free speech, not so much. You may have to turn over your machine but so what? Don’t keep criminal evidence on there, for hell’s sakes, and if there is any and it wasn’t named in the warrant then yippee, it will be quashed.

If, on the other hand, the first thing you do when the knock on the door comes is trash your hard drive on which you have evidence of a crime like kiddie porn, the cops and the prosecutors and the jury and the judge will be less sympathetic than if it were say a jihadist training site and you had a reasonable story about being simply curious.

I’ve crawled through a bunch of those and am still here, unvisited. Could come tomorrow, who knows, but I won’t be trashing my hard drive.

be up late, BIO.

you always make me want to spank…things.

“seldom” the result of the police. um-kay.

as we say, “what you talking ’bout, white man?”

just us is justice for some. if you take my meaning.

sleep well, dear.

All the FBI got out of the link they put out - on a chat room known for internet distribution of kiddie porn - was a search warrant. If the subject had been clean, he would have been inconvenienced to be sure - and there’s an argument there about fairness, no question - but there would have likely been no prosecution and very unlikely to have been a conviction.

Unfortunately, that is not all the FBI got out of the link:

http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9899151…

Vosburgh was charged with violating federal law, which criminalizes “attempts” to download child pornography with up to 10 years in prison. Last November, a jury found Vosburgh guilty on that count, and a sentencing hearing is scheduled for April 22, at which point Vosburgh could face three to four years in prison.

They got a conviction from the link. And perhaps as much as a 3-4 year prison sentence.

You may argue that the US Attorney would not have moved forward on the charges if Vosbergh hadn’t acted guilty as sin, but I would rather not rely on the discretion of a politically appointed US Attorney to do the just thing.

All the FBI got was a warrant. US Attorney’s Office got the conviction. There’s a difference.

Were Mr. Vosberg’s actions entirely innocent, let’s say nothing more than curiosity, he would have been well advised to have constructed that scenario before he began to poke around in kiddie-porn chat rooms and started clicking on links offering illegal materials. Any prudent, thoughtful person would document their fact-gathering-only intention ahead of time, to provide defense counsel with a plausible story to tell should the need arise.

Mr. Vosberg did not do that, apparently, or his defense attorney would have introduced it at trial. And, there was no evidence that the photo files on his hard drive got there from some virus or otherwise out of his control or that too would have been cited. It could all be a grand conspiracy to entrap and convict an innocent man, to drive up the numbers and satisfy bureaucratic imperatives like a traffic ticket quota. Except for that trying to trash the hard drive thing; not the act of an innocent man.

Internet law is a mess, and it is going to take some time to sort through. I’m not persuaded that “founder’s intent” is going to help much; there really is a limit to how much of a burden we can put on the mind-frame of people so long dead. The current flap over NSA spying on internet traffic is difficult to frame in 18th Century terms. Is there really a reasonable expectation of privacy to an e-mail that’s sent through a third-party with administrative privileges that allow them to read it? Is an e-mail like a letter? In that case, like a letter, the name and address of the sender and recipient are open and available for all to read. Or is it more like a postcard, with the message also open? That’s always been my view, the postcard; I accept that someone somewhere in the system could easily read what I’ve written and so anything secretive I’ve sent by mail or other carrier in a sealed envelope. Common sense, seems to me.

In our awkward way we’re having that discussion now, through the political process, and I’m keenly interested in how it plays out. There will have to be some regulation, no sphere of human activity exists for long without it, the criminals always move in and take over otherwise. Freedom and liberty versus security is always a tension, and yes the will of government is always to subdue so that has to be fought through as well. Interesting, and for me not entirely clear.

As for the notion of massive entrapment programs rounding up all progressives into internment camps, well, not my dark fantasy. Considering the malevolence of this administration, and their backers who have controlled the executive for nearly 20 out of the last 28 years, there has been surprisingly little. A few hapless wannabe terrorists have been rounded up and inconvenienced, but that will happen if you talk openly about overthrowing the government. Completely innocent Americans locked away, only a handful; that’s a handful too many, make no mistake about what I’m saying, but it isn’t anything approaching a mass roundup. Another four or eight years with this cabal in the White House and we will be in bigger trouble, but hopefully that will not occur. I’m getting a bit old now for creeping around in the dark and wreaking havoc in the streets.

I would have demonstrated a browser hijack attack and said “you can’t prove my client clicked a damn thing,” but I’ve been in the network business a long time.

My point, however, is that while justice may have been served here (and we don’t know this is true, but it probably is), this is a dangerous law and a dangerous precedent.

If you want to build in that clicking a link is only reason for suspicion (this is what you’re implying with the warrant argument) and not conviction, then can we get the law fixed, please? Or are we gonna have to have more injustices like this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/13/tea…

Your argument could certainly have been persuasive in getting the original warrant quashed, if there were any evidence - even a shred - that it happened. Speculation alone will sometimes work with a jury, cf: OJ, but not usually with a judge. Getting the warrant quashed would take a whole lot more than maybe-maybe, especially in the face of the suspect’s attempt to destroy evidence.

That a willful commission of a crime should not be punished, especially when that crime involves kiddieporn, is a tough sell. On the internet, as in other aspects of life, it is certainly possible to blunder innocently into criminality. I’m just not seeing anything here that argues innocence, and a whole lot that argues criminal intent.

If the law needs changed, then by all means start. I wouldn’t pick a kiddieporn case with a defendant who has shown consciousness of guilt as the flagship for that effort, all’s I’m saying.

Please don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that this guy is innocent and got a bum rap. It’s that an action that a PC browser takes should be a crime at all, since it is trivially easy to fool a browser into doing nearly anything, and everybody’s PC has browser-related malware on it. There’s lots and lots of malware out there that simulates browser clicks — it makes money for VXers.

If the suspect were in possession of kiddie porn (please don’t misunderstand, he probably was) that’s a crime and should be punished.

If the suspect destroyed his disk drive to wipe out that evidence, that’s a crime too, obstruction of justice (ask Scooter Libby).

But he wasn’t convicted of either of those things. He was convicted because his browser requested a naughty web page. That is very, very bad.

Take a look at that link I put in again. That teacher was convicted because a web browser that was infected with malware that showed naughty pictures to her students through no action of her own.

Appalling. Good link.

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Bad convictions happen, all too frequently, but this one looks like it will turn out acceptably. The teacher whose case you linked to, the one convicted of child endangerment because porno popped up on her computer in front of students, has been was granted a new trial last June and the conviction set aside.

From all that’s been written this should have never happened in the first place; it reads like a perfect storm of incompetence and malice. School had let their security software expire months earlier but they didn’t want the blame; prosecutor sounds completely unhinged, threatened her with 40 years and tried to get her to plea bargain for 18 (which thankfully she refused); there was testimony on appeal that the judge fell asleep several times during the trial and had instructed the jurors to hurry along because she wanted to finish up by the weekend so she could keep some other appointments. Bizarre.

One commentary speculates that since no new date has been set for retrial, the state and the school are trying to sort out a settlement with Amaro at which time the charges will be dropped. Nothing will make up for the fear and time lost, but hopefully the settlement will be substantial. Sacking the judge and prosecutor would also be good.