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| entrapment
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A new method of entrapment
Brian Rothery
There is a new and devastating form of entrapment being carried out against certain dissenters by some police forces directly or by their accomplices. Evidence suggests that it may be confined for the moment to the FBI in the US and to the UK police and their accomplices in the UK computer forensics industry, the latter being managed mainly by ex-police officers or by the police in an unholy alliance with ‘independent’ experts. This should not be too surprising as the UK computer forensics industry works almost exclusively, if not totally, for the police and prosecution service.
The new form of entrapment is clever and deadly. A dissident has to be both reasonably successful in his activities and a danger or embarrassment to the police to be worth ‘taking out’. If he is reasonably successful, it means that he is being read over his web site and perhaps in spin-off media reports and is exposing facts which are embarrassing or even dangerous for the police. This in turn makes it likely that he has one or more professionally-managed web sites hosted by a server which provides him with daily statistics over a control panel. If, in addition, he is a good writer or employs good writers, traffic to his site will grow as will the number of links from other web sites. These links will come from two sources: from simple lists of ‘recommended’ web sites or from mentions in text, such as articles or in forum-type comments. If the link is a hyperlink, which is likely, it will show up in the daily statistics every time a reader of the remote web site page clicks on it, so that on a daily basis, perhaps after a 24 hour delay, the number of visiting readers from other web sites shows together with the URL of the sites and the number from each site that clicked each day. This web site, for example (inquisition21), has the good fortune to receive hundreds of such visits from hundreds of other web sites each month, some repeating every day or week and some new each day or each few days.
There are two aspects of these visits of extreme importance to every good editor. First the nature and orientation of the web sites producing these visitors, and, second, where they come from a comment on the remote site, what they are saying about his site? Is it good or bad? This is the all-important feedback that every editor needs.
Each day, or every few days, a good editor will glance down the list of visitors under the heading of ‘Other Sites’ on his stats, as time goes by not bothering to examine the familiar ones whose ‘recommended sites’ links produce regular traffic, but looking closely at those coming from sites as a result of a comment such as one in a discussion thread in a forum, or an article, to see what the contributor is saying. Of particular interest will be traffic coming from new web sites, the only indication of newness being an unfamiliar URL.
As this is now very important and a warning to all dissenting web editors, it will be spelt out fully. Say your web site is www.myownsite1.com and you see in your daily stats several visitors the previous day from www.jagforums-1.com, a web site new to you. As all the URLs show on your stats as hyperlinks, you simply have to click on it to see the actual site from which the traffic originated. The technicalities become a bit complex here but that complexity does not confuse the main story. They are that you do not always easily find the source of the link. The main page only may come up while the source must be searched for on an inside page. Perversely, as explained in what now follows, after the hyperlink was used to get evidence of traffic onto your stats, the remote webmaster may have deliberately removed it, causing you to search fruitlessly into his web site looking for the link or comment. On the other hand, the link you click on may bring you directly into an internal page where the comment was or still may be.
The webmaster of www.jagforums-1.com (a fictional URL used for explanation purposes here) is in fact what we have referred to in other cases on this web site as a criminal webmaster, an expression derived from Operation Ore where criminal webmasters ruined thousands to an extent that neither the police nor courts could acknowledge.
But that was in credit card scams, whereas this one is entrapment. The web site www.jagforums-1.com is in fact set up with images of child pornography to entrap the innocent activist editor who is simply trying to see what new visitors to his web site are saying about his site. He makes one click on the hyperlink in the stats and he has images of little girls being involved in illegal activities, or whatever, on his screen. And even after he deletes them, unless he runs special clearing software, which takes knowledge and time, they are still on his hard drive. If the police are in cohorts with the criminal webmaster who has carried out this entrapment, they can raid before the clearance is complete.
Let us now examine some especially perverse aspects of this situation, and this editor can assure the reader that this is coming from one with very direct and personal knowledge of this situation, both as related to this web site, which has been attacked, and to the many individuals it tries to represent. First, it is virtually impossible to report this crime, for several reasons. This editor has been treated with contempt by the FBI in attempts to expose their continued exploitation of one girl they had ‘saved’. (See the link to the Masha story below.) Their response was to increase the number of young girls whose bodies they were exhibiting. Neither the UK police nor courts would look at evidence of criminality and fraud in the prosecutions carried out under Operation Ore. The few whistleblowers who tried to protest were silenced, some crushed.
The biggest problem, however, is that you cannot safely say that you were the object of an entrapment attempt because, when you innocently clicked on the link, child porn appeared on your computer screen. This writer cannot even say here that it happened. It gets worse. If it is apparent from a brief look at the images that real children are being exploited in the course of this entrapment (although it is recognized that in most cases old images are used), one cannot report this crime. If anyone thinks that this is not so and that the police will welcome him as an innocent witness that person is naive. The seizure of one’s computers and exposure in the media are the very least of the certain consequences.
This new entrapment scheme is the perfect crime for the police as they do not even have to set up their own web sites. It was clear from the Masha story below that the FBI were hosting a site on a large Californian server with which they must have had an arrangement, but the UK police can simply use an existing web site already trading in child porn, with which they have an arrangement or even one over which they have little or no control such as one hosted in Russia or the Far East. Most of these will be known to the police managed Internet Watch Foundation and all it requires is that a suitable site has a forum or other means for subscribers to make comments. The police, or their friends in the UK computer forensics industry, simply (and legally as they have the authority) access those sites and make a comment about the targeted web site, giving the URL which will appear in a hyperlink. A day or so later some innocent editor sees the URL in his stats, clicks on it to see what is being said and is criminalized.
This criminalization may never be legally confirmed as the objective of silencing or taking out the critic may be achieved by simple intimidation or blackmail, the threat of media exposure, for example, or that of trial by a capricious or prejudiced court system. See, for example, what happened critics of Operation Ore in the book The Appalling Vista (link below).
The basic fault here is that the child pornography legislation is unjust and badly thought out. While the above is a new entrapment scheme, other threats such as malware, identity theft and Trojans have existed for years. While the police can criminalize someone by using legal means, any malicious individual can also ruin an enemy in the same way except that they have to take the risk of managing or using an illegal web site. Here is one final example of the absurdity of the child pornography laws. It is possible using existing software to manipulate all of the images on the Internet, including adults engaged in pornographic activities, beautiful landscapes, animals, religious icons and children. There is a method of producing millions of variations of such images. In the process it is inevitable that very quickly images of children will be made that show them either naked or engaged in all the activities adults engage in. The program will run at great speed and produce so many images that one would have to keep dumping them offline to make more space. But even if one never stopped to look for the manipulated images of children, the law has already been broken. In fact it was broken even before the program was run because the law says that it is a crime to possess such software and every modern PC already has that software, so every owner of a PC is already guilty of the crime of possessing software that can produce child porn. One reason why so many innocent families have been ruined by the child pornography laws is that the laws are stupid, but another reason may be that the state wants it that way.
A final warning. As an inefficient and corrupt police force wants more convictions for less effort and with little danger to itself, the option of the entrapment of even those not a threat to the police becomes increasingly attractive, and apart from the police all of us are at risk from malicious individuals who would like to do us harm, so no one is safe from this new evil.
The Masha story is here.
The unholy alliance of police and the forensics industry is here.
The Appalling Vista – the fight back against Operation Ore is here.
Comments
DT in ‘Free continental Europe’
One way perhaps to prevent inadvertently self-soiling home hard drives and permanently wrecking lives is for such editing checks on statistics to be made on say irregular monthly or bi-monthly visits to local or remote towns with cyber cafés and never to use the same town or cyber café in-sequence. Well planned and brief online access by a user at such places could not promptly alert the evil forces and any subsequent raid on home hardware would reveal nothing – that is, of course, other than what might be criminally placed on such hardware after any raid.
Editor. Thanks DT. That would work if one agreed to be subjected to such a totalitarian routine. In my own case, however, there is only one cyber café in the local town and they would tend to know me after even one visit. But your advice drives home how corrupt and unjust the police can be.
James in the UK.
One can see from this story why organizations such as CEOP and the IWF in the UK need a constant supply of child abuse images. First to stay in business and second for material with which to secure prosecutions. I understand from a German source that only the FBI are allowed to legally publish child abuse images for entrapment purposes, so the method in your story using, I presume, sites supplied by the IWF to CEOP would provide a welcome entrapment system for the UK authorities.
Id400 in Germany
It is important to be aware that the global drive to monitor and criminalize child abuse images is part of a huge surveillance industry in which virtually all of the major players participate, in an alliance with politicians.
Created on 12/30/2011 11:33 PM by Editor
Updated on 01/04/2012 10:02 AM by Editor
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