This post claims: "[T]he FBI has taken it upon itself to arrest people in pre-dawn raids for what they say is the crime of clicking the wrong link."
That would be horrible if true; Declan McCullagh's original article seems to suggest it's true, yet that contradicts what I'd already read in Orin Kerr's post on the topic.
In Kerr's reading, "the FBI has begun using fake hyperlinks to alleged child pornography images to build cases in child porn investigations" -- and "The key question is whether clicking on a link constitutes probable cause to search a home."
(For what it's worth, I think it's obvious that there are many cases where simply clicking a link is probable cause to suspect you possess child porn, but equally obvious that simply clicking a link should never be in itself a prosecutable act.)
And yet, from the original article:
"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)."
He was convicted on the first count (clicking the hyperlink) and the last (having images of naked minors). Given the description of those images, I suspect that they swayed the jury to convicting him at all.
Posted by Matt Bruce at March 26, 2008 11:02 AM