Waaaagh!

There's an old axiom that legislation is generally a decade behind technology with regards to having to style itself in a manner that would make a particular act against the rules. For years we had online gambling - and the feds forced to try to apply a 1956 wirefraud statute (and fail miserably in the fifth circuit when they did) before they managed the UIGEA. Beyond that we have questions such as 'would your community consider tubgirl to have socially redeeming features' - and if not, then there are a number of older state and federal laws that probably come into play that could be enforced at the local level...

which leads me to rickrolling...

see... the FBI has decided that its going to post entrapment child-pornography links on the intarwebs - and they're going to come after you if you click them.
Which means using functionality like tinyurl just got dangerous for our friendly politicians, and if you use firefox you'd best not be using prefetching (which pulls links from a page) because i promise they both look like 'clicks' to a server log... besides which, in this story, the feds arent even keeping referrer logs - so they arent even capturing whether the link came from someone who was at the board in question...

Of course, i assume the people who're seriously after CP are going to use the Onion router, or pull through longhaul VPN anonymizing services, or stay in the dark corners like Usenet or otherwise old abandoned forums for long-dead motion pictures... i cant know for sure... then again, i have a wireless router in my house - who's to say that someone downloading ANYTHING from this location was me to begin with.

I'm not saying that people who traffic in CP shouldnt be hunted - but that's why we have chris hanson. I think that the moron at the FBI who thought that being exposed to something unintentionally because some Johnny the ReRe chooses to toss an underage camwhore picture up on the latest incarnation of rec.pets.cats is fucked up - but maybe that's just me. Afterall, I find 4chan amusing - and i assume there's probably something that smells a lot like CP pretty close to the surface of /b/ if i went looking for it...

What it means is that people are going to have to anonymize ALL of their traffic - just to protect themselves from malicious prosecution by an overzealous nannystate that cant take a fucking joke - and when we all start doing that the feds might as well start hawking those echelon servers on ebay - because it wouldn't be hard to get a couple thumbnails of young girls on just about anyone's computer...