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from the how-much-can-you-trust-anyone-online? dept.
Several people have been warning users to avoid The Pirate Bay, due to CloudFlare integration and potential FBI IP bugs. There are even suggestions that the FBI has been involved in the site's somewhat mysterious rebirth.
Nobody knows who really runs The Pirate Bay, but the old moderation team were all removed as part of the relaunch. The Pirate Bay now allows people to 'report' malicious torrents instead of having a moderation team.
Some claim the FBI re-launched The Pirate Bay or had connections to the owners, implanting IP bugs on all torrent’s uploaded for investigation. The Pirate Bay has denied these accusations, claiming CloudFlare is only a temporary measure to help with the influx of traffic on the torrenting site.
CloudFlare is a cloud server provider, but is based in the US. Many privacy advocates claim CloudFlare is not a safe tool, due to the potential warrant-less searches from the FBI and other US agencies. On the topic of working with the FBI, The Pirate Bay has not responded, but TorrentFreak claims the accusations are "complete nonsense" but said that "general security concerns of using a US-based service are legitimate".
What does SoylentNews think? Is it wise to stay away?
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:03PM
If the FBI relaunched the piratebay website, wouldn't they be legally restricted to only hosting copyright free material?
Suppose you download an album with copyright protection off of the pirate bay. Can the FBI charge you, if they were the ones hosting it? Couldn't a defense lawyer tear that apart?
Even if a defense lawyer couldn't, wouldn't the FBI be legally just a liable as the downloader?
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:05PM
Law enforcement honeypot all the time, and probably have some small-text to let them do it legally.
I'm not a lawyer, tho.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:23PM
It's an interesting area to sort out. However, as far as I'm aware, undercover "sting" operations are lawful. The real question would be entrapment - are they enticing you to do something you wouldn't otherwise want to do? Or are they just letting you do the thing you wanted to do anyways, and using your actions as evidence against you.
Consider two cases. In one, an undercover FBI agent knows a person is having marital problems. The agent buddies up to the target at a bar and says "You know, a lot of your problems go away if your wife were to die unexpectedly. I know a guy who can help with that..." The guy initially says no, then thinks about it, then says "maybe you're right," and calls the hitman (who is also an undercover FBI agent). That's entrapment - there's no reason to believe the target was planning to hire a hitman before the FBI suggested it. They induced the criminal activity. This likely wouldn't hold up in court (IANAL).
Now consider the FBI taking out an ad in Soldier of Fortune offering vague "problem solving" services. A man calls the service, saying he's been having issues with his wife and he'd like to have the problem "taken care of." They negotiate a price, but when the buyer shows up with the money he's arrested. That's a sting. In this case, the man clearly had the intent to behave criminally before he called the FBI agent, and initiated the process. The FBI merely facilitated the criminal behavior up to the point where they had sufficient evidence of a crime to arrest. This likely would hold up in court.
So, which case is hosting a torrent site more like? I'd think it was more like the second case - given someone who's already demonstrated the desire to behave illegally, and knowingly initiated an illegal activity, they facilitate the criminal behavior to gather evidence. If you come to their site, and knowingly try to download a AAA shooter for free, it's not entrapment. You came to them.
Entrapment would be them sending spam to thousands of people saying "AAA games! 100% free! 100% legal! Come to our site today!" That's inducing people to behave in a way they otherwise wouldn't.
Here's a better question. When did enforcing copyright restrictions (which are a civil matter of property rights) in the US become the domain of the FBI (whose mission is to investigate and prosecute interstate crimes)? I know that this is the case, and I'm sure there are some statutes out there (remember when there was VHS and we had to watch those warnings), but really we're talking about law enforcement bodies enforcing property disputes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by romlok on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:39PM
What if I came to their site to download a Debian Linux ISO, and among the search results was an offer to download a pirated copy of "Debian does Dallas"? I didn't go to them for anything illegal, yet the site offered me something illegal. Would that be entrapment?
If the site were then flooded with pirated content with punny Linux-distro titles, would the FBI be unable to prosecute any of the downloaders due to entrapment?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:43PM
Debian is infected with systemd.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 13 2015, @11:22AM
As far as I know, downloading systemd is not illegal.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:40PM
Another question you didn't touch: If I'm a copyright holder, and the FBI sets up a filesharing honeypot and puts my content on it without my consent, doesn't the FBI then violate my rights as copyrights holder? What if they set up the honeypot in a way that others can populate it, and those others distribute my content over the honeypot without my consent?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:51PM
I'm assuming the RIAA, MPAA, etc., would gladly consent to the FBI hosting their content as part of a sting to catch illegal downloaders...
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:21PM
Yeah, but what about the video game cracks? Sure, the game itself is owned by a friendly corp, but at least some of the code in the crack is owned by some hacker somewhere...not to mention that they're illegal to distribute under the DMCA to begin with. If this is a honeypot it could lead to some *hilarious* lawsuits....
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:43PM
Interesting. What if the FBI arrested you after they shot your wife though? That seems even more similar to this situation, if the FBI were to be hosting legitimate torrent files. And I think that is a safe assumption, since if the torrents were fake, then everyone would immediately know it was a sting.
On the other hand, maybe the FBI would take the position (comically) that hosting torrents isn't copyright infringement. I doubt it though.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Thursday February 12 2015, @04:33PM
Change problem wife to terrorist target and you have exactly what the FBI has been doing recently when it "foils another terrorist plot". In some cases, the FBI has spent a couple of years and a lot of money pushing the target (sorry, the "suspected terrorist") to move forward with the plot (which the FBI has completely invented).
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday February 12 2015, @05:35PM
Fortunately, those cases don't wind up in court anyways - you just call them an enemy combatant and have done with them. So you sidestep the legal issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:14PM
There's no such thing as "entrapment" anymore. Nowdays its called a "reverse sting operation".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 12 2015, @03:27PM
> If the FBI relaunched the piratebay website, wouldn't they be legally restricted to only hosting copyright free material?
They don't host anything. It is all magnet links which aren't even torrents, just hashes.
I would be more concerned with the trackers, but the trackers are chosen by person creating the magnet links, no the pirate bay. That is, unless, they are reading the trackers off the posted magnet links and then creating new ones with additional trackers which they then publish instead. But if they were doing that, someone would have surely have noticed by now because it is trivially easy to see if the magnet link you posted is the same one they published.
(Score: 3, Informative) by wantkitteh on Thursday February 12 2015, @06:22PM
Prosecutors will trump any tiny thing they can into a Felony 37th class 2000-year sentence to intimidate you into a plea bargain. In those circumstances, a little procedural impropriety that'll never come to light in court means nothing - I can't find the link, but someone linked to a story in a comment here on SN where a guy was advised to plea bargain by his own lawyer, even though the arresting officers lied about the crime he supposedly committed and they had video evidence of him not committing the crime he was accused of. He stood up to the bullying US legal system and got an acquittal instead of taking the advice he paid for, accepting the plea bargain and ending up in prison.
tl;dr - Aaron Schwartz
(Score: 1) by number11 on Thursday February 12 2015, @09:39PM
Since when did the FBI (or other 3-letter agencies) overly worry about whether what they were doing was legal? They can always get John Yoo to write them a legal opinion saying that it is legal. And what makes you think they'd admit to running TPB? Once they know who you are, they can always find some other way to identify you, that's called "parallel construction".
And the copyright liability is a civil matter, not a criminal one. Civil means the copyright holder would have to sue them. And (in most cases) guess what, you can't sue the feds unless they first give you permission to sue them (that's called "sovereign immunity"). Good luck with that.
No, they're pretty much above the law. Laws are for the little people, not them.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday February 16 2015, @03:56PM
It would be trivial for the FBI to get permission from the copyright holders to distribute content for the purposes of a sting operation.